The Rebel God

Hope is a verb

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 19 Sep 2020 21:02:00 +0000

In these times it is hard to have hope. Ruth Bader Ginsburg died yesterday, and I heard someone say today, their voice shaking, holding back tears, "Hope is annoying because it requires something from us." That rung true, and got me to thinking:

If it is true that God is love, then perhaps it is equally true that God is hope.

I know John didn't say it, but I just did. That would mean that hope is a living Someone who requires something from us. Hope asks us to act.

I've always thought of hope as passively believing in an unlikely outcome. But I'm starting to see that hope comes from our actions, just like love does.

To put it differently, I'm sure you've heard that "love is a verb." While Hollywood thinks of love as a feeling, Jesus saw love as an action. Love is something you do. It is an act.

I'm learning that hope is a verb too. Hope is not a feeling. Hope is not passive. Hope is an act which is inseparably tied to acts of love, to acts of justice. Adding in justice there brings in a third thing, but really they are all tied together.

Taking this a step further, we are made in the image of God. That means we are made for love, made to be loved and to love others. It is our life blood.

I feel bad right now. But I don't have to feel good, I just have to keep doing good, and as I act in hope I am moving with God.

If God is hope, then we are also made for hope. To live in God is to live in love and to live in hope. To move with God is to move in love and to move in hope. So I dare you to move.

Facing Racism

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 10 Aug 2019 22:11:00 +0000

The Trump era has caused us to face the ugly specter of racism. No one wants to think of themselves as racist. When someone says "that's racist" let alone "you're being racist" or worst of all "you're a racist" our natural reaction is to deny and defend ourselves against the accusation. It's more than an accusation, it's a condemnation. Our response is to want to distance ourselves from people or groups that we see as racist, as if by doing that we could claim to be immune and untouched and pure.

I recently came across a talk by David Gushee called "In the Ruins of White Evangelicalism" which he gave as the presidential address to the AAR. In the talk he said that the connection between Trump's base being racist and white evangelicals being the demographic most likely to support Trump made it an inescapable conclusion for him that racism was a major problem within evangelicalism. He says he is driven to the conclusion that evangelicals support Trump not in spite of his racism and cruelty, but because of it.

But the part that really impacted me was where he went from there. Although he had distanced himself from evangelicalism, he did not distance himself from its sin of racism. Instead he wondered how he, as a major voice within evangelicalism focusing on ethics, could have been blind to racism for all those years. His talk therefore was one of him confessing and repenting for what he called the sin of racism.

Calling racism a sin is interesting because it opens up a way to see racism that leads to self-reflection and growth. Let me unpack this. As Christians we should be familiar with the concept of confessing that we are sinners. We see this in the catechisms, but also in the Gospels, in the parable Jesus tells of the Pharisee and the tax collector,

The Pharisee stood by himself and prayed: "God, I thank you that I am not like other people—robbers, evildoers, adulterers—or even like this tax collector."

But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, "God, have mercy on me, a sinner."

I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God. (Luke 18:11-14)

If we come at sin like the Pharisee, saying "I was a sinner before, but now I've repented and go to church and am saved and chosen. I thank God that I am not like those sinners outside of my church" then Jesus says we don't go away justified, even though we are trying to justify ourselves. Growing up evangelical I heard statements like that made from the pulpit constantly. "Thank God we are not like those liberals, gays, woman's lib-ers, welfare queens, Muslims out there!" In other words, I heard messages of homophobia, misogyny, xenophobia, and racism constantly growing up evangelical.

Of course as an ex-vangelical it's just as easy for me to say "Thank God that I am not like those racist Trump supporting evangelicals over there." It's easy to write of racism as a problem "over there" in evangelicalsm, or in the South. In fact, it's really common for progressives and liberals in an attempt to "out-woke" each other to condemn others for the sins of racism and white privilege. People will be shamed and ostracized on social media, calls will go out for people to be fired and shunned for some insensitive comment or act. In that atmosphere of self-righteous progressivism, it's really no wonder people react defensively. They act like they are being attacked and condemned because... well, they are. Progressives see themselves as champions of compassion, but boy can they be merciless.

Jesus said we should remove the log from our eye before we take the splinter from our brother's eye. What if I looked at my own life before I became the progressive moral police of social media? Maybe if I did, I could approach others with the same mercy I know I need. Maybe if I did I could have conversations rather than accusations. Maybe I as a progressive Christian need to take the stance of the tax collector in Jesus' parable and say, "God, have mercy on me, a racist!" What if instead of seeking to prove myself innocent of racism, I assume that just as I am a sinner, just as I know that I can do things that hurt others, I am open to the idea that I have blind spots in me, I have racial bias, and am therefore open to seeing this and becoming sensitized to it so I can do better.

I also feel pulled to look back at my evangelical past and try to make sense of why it is that evangelicals today so overwhelmingly support Trump, as Gushee says, not in spite of his racist cruelty, but because of it. At the same time, evangelicals would all deny that they are racist. I think that's due to a misconception of what racism is. We think of racism as the stereotypical Southern plantation owner in the Hollywood film. We think that if we don't have malicious intent in our hearts, that we are not racist. But the thing is, people who do evil and hurtful things, even horrific things, never think they are doing evil. They think they are doing good. That's why the whole focus of "but I don't have any racism in my heart!" misses the point, and blinds us to the racial blinders that lead to do cruel and hurtful things.

What's behind racism is a reaction to fear that causes us to be tribal, to protect our tribe, and if "they" suffer as a result, well that's just too bad. It comes from perceiving some other group as being a threat, and reacting in fear to that threat. Fear is the opposite of empathy and compassion. As Gushee says in his address, American white evangelicalism today has really become "U.S. white tribalist religion" characterized by "aggrieved white conservatives." That stance of "aggrieved whites" of course is the constant mantra of Fox News, and it very much echoes what I heard from the pulpit Sunday after Sunday, a message of fear and resentment towards "those sinners out there" who were a threat to our family, our way of life.

That tribalist fear stance is very much tied to the tendency in evangelicalism to justify violence as good and righteous. Evangelicals are more likely than just about any other demographic to support violence as a means to good, whether that's supporting torture, war, capital punishment. When you tie that propensity to justifying violence and cruelty together with demonizing other groups, fearing them, seeing them as a threat, it seems inevitable that when little black boys are shot by cops, evangelicals stress that "blue lives matter" and when hispanic children are traumatically ripped from their parents and held in concentration camps, white evangelicals feel the need to justify and support this.

If you feel threatened, it's a natural human reaction (Paul would call it a fleshly reaction) to justify a harsh, merciless response.

The two poisons of racism and violence go hand in hand, specifically violence understood as a means to good, and racism as a fearful otherizing and thus dehumanizing of a person or group. Of the two of these, I want to argue the most important one to address is racism. I do not want, therefore, to propose a Christian solution of total abstinence from violence. That is, I am not arguing that the police should not be armed, we should not have an army, or even that a person cannot defend themselves in their home. I say this, primarily because it is utterly impracticable. If we want to take steps towards reducing violence, towards less cruelty, towards more compassionate way I living together, I don't think abstinence from violence is the key.

Rather, I want to argue that the core problem here has to do with the otherizing or dehumanizing of a person or group. When we see a person or group as a threat, as "other" it is easy to justify cruel or inhuman treatment. We see them as a monster, an animal. If we instead saw them as our brother, our sister, our child, as part of us, we would seek to deal with them in more humane ways. This would lead to a reduction in violence, a reduction in cruelty and hurt. We would find other ways because we value the other as we value our own. That's something that Jesus was constantly preaching, widening our circle to include loving the sinner, loving the enemy.

Conservatives need to not see liberals and people of color as the evil other, and progressives similarly need to not see white evangelicals as the evil other. Isn't that what "love your enemy" means? That is, it does not mean they are not your enemy, but that you should act lovingly towards them nevertheless. We should see them as a part of us. Again, that does not mean we tolerate people doing or saying hurtful things, but it does mean dealing with them as we would deal with someone beloved, which would lead us to seeking ways to deal with things restoratively and humanely.

Disarming The Church

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 03 Jun 2018 19:46:00 +0000

Eric Seibert has a new book out called Disarming the Church which I which I received a review copy of. I've always appreciated how Eric's books challenge readers to really think through difficult issues. In other words, rather than spoon feeding us the answers, his books do the true work of a teacher, which is getting his audience to think, and providing us with the tools to do that. His previous books (Disturbing Divine Behavior and The Violence of Scripture) helped us grapple with the problem of violence in the Bible, and his latest book (Disarming the Church) challenges us to take up the nonviolent way of Jesus.

This is an incredibly important and relevant topic today. We have an epidemic of gun violence and mass shootings in this country, and our elected officials (i.e. the GOP) refuse to pass reasonable gun safety legislation to stop it. If you are looking for a way to reduce deaths due to gun violence and to protect the lives of our school kids, let's vote them out!

As you can probably tell from the above paragraph, my own focus in regards to nonviolence is not so much to see nonviolence as a personal prohibition. Rather what I am looking for are ways to reduce our epidemic of violence, ways for us to break free of this addiction, ways for all of us to disarm. That's why I was particularly drawn to the later part of Eric’s book where he discusses ways in which we can respond to personal assault nonviolently without being harmed, how we can rescue people under attack without violence, and so on. Eric begins this part of the book by quoting Walter Wink, who says,

“Our capacity to discover creative nonviolent responses in moments of crisis will depend, to some degree at least, on whether we rehearse them in our every day lives. If we live in the spirit of Christian nonviolent love in the little things, then in the great things we will be more likely to have something to call upon.”

Eric then proceeds to tell many stories of how people have defused potentially violent situations in nonviolent ways, each time looking at what was going on and what we can learn from these stories. I very much appreciate this, and shared many of the stories in Eric's book with my family. We were inspired by the examples, and talked together about it. One story that I was particularly moved by was of an escaped prisoner who threatened a couple in their home with a shotgun. The woman ended up disarming him with love, and the convict later became a Christian as a result (you’ll need to read the story yourself in Eric’s book for the details!) The take-away of the convict, and my take-away too, was that she exhibited “real Christianity...no fear.” People often view nonviolence as a way to avoid conflict, but it is not. It is a way to address conflict. It requires bravery, fearlessness. Perfect love casts out fear. The kind of Christianity that clings to guns is a faith engulfed in fear. Fear is what must be exorcised from the church, and true love—Jesus-shaped love—is what casts it out.

Eric mentions that his wife is a therapist, and tells how he learned from her how patients who become violent are restrained in a way that does not harm them, either physically or emotionally. This is one example of how the mental heath field has moved in the direction of finding nonviolent ways to deal with conflict and danger that seek to maintain a patient’s agency and dignity. In other words, it’s an example of change on an institutional and systemic level. Mental health professionals have developed policies, protocols, and best practices that have generally moved in the direction of nonviolence.

This is the element that I would like to add to his many helpful personal examples. While I very much appreciate the focus in his book on how we as individuals can practice nonviolence in our lives, I also want to suggest that we also need to work towards systemic change.

In other words, we could learn a lot from looking at how various professionals implement nonviolent strategies in their work to resolve conflict. We could look at how couples counselors or mediators work. We could look to the field of international diplomacy. We could look to the growing study of conflict resolution. We could look at the tools of hostage negotiators.

Speaking of that last one, the tools of hostage negotiators have been shown to help police to deescalate dangerous situations in ways that statistically keep them safe and everyone else safe--if they receive that training. However, that training often does not take place, and as we have seen from the Black Lives Matter movement, police are far too quick to kill people of color, rather than deescalating a situation. In general our criminal justice system functions as if we knew nothing about how humans function from the mental health field, as if we were in the middle ages. As a result, it is, as a system, very prone to violence, in the sense that Eric defines violence in his book as “physical, emotional, or psychological harm done to a person by an individual(s), institution, or structure that results in serious injury, oppression, or death.” We are in deep need of reform in our criminal justice system, taking it in the direction of nonviolence, treating people with love leading to rehabilitation and reconciliation.

But the main point I wanted to add is the idea of taking the tools from these many fields that are using nonviolent means to resolve conflict and learning from them. While I totally agree with Wink’s above statement, at the same time, as Gene Sharp has convincingly demonstrated, those participating in nonviolent resistance do not necessarily need to have “love in their hearts” (i.e. good will, empathy, etc.) towards their oppressors in order to be effective as a moral force for change. What matters is not their inner feelings, but their actions. This is incidentally a point made by Jesus constantly. While Evangelical Christianity tends to focus on what is “in your heart,” Jesus understood love in terms of action, in terms of what we do: “As you do it unto the least of these you do it unto me,” “do unto others as you would have them do it unto you,” and so on. So when Jesus says, "If you love me you will obey my commands, and this is my command: love each other" he is understanding love in terms of action not feeling. If you love me, Jesus says, you will do what I command, which is to love. Jesus defines love as what we do. Jesus says this to those who call him lord (and I'll add: to those who say they "love Jesus in their heart") but do not do unto the least of these in love: "I do not know you, depart from me into darkness prepared for the devil." He literally says to those so-called Christians, "I do not know you, go to hell!" I really don't think Jesus could possibly make himself any more clear here. Knowing Jesus is not about loving him in your heart, it is about following Jesus in how he loves. That's what makes you his disciple or not. And if you want to go there, that's what determines whether Jesus will invite you to him with the words "well done by faithful servant" or whether he tells you to go... somewhere else.

What we therefore need is training in how to do, how to act, how to respond nonviolently, and we need to practice that training. That’s true if you are walking down the Selma bridge with Martin Luther King Jr., and it’s true if you are a therapist working on a locked psych ward, and it’s true if you are a hostage negotiator. We could all benefit from incorporating some of that training and tools into our own lives, not to mention incorporating them into institutions that currently lack them.

That’s all for now. I’ll likely have more to say as I continue to read. Eric, let me say that I am grateful for your book, for you sharing your thoughts on how you are working out what it means to follow in the nonviolent way of Jesus. As I try to follow in that same way, your book and your witness are a welcome companion. Our world needs voices like yours, and I hope many people will pick up a copy of Disarming the Church.

The Point of Hebrews: Further Conversation with Paul Copan

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 19 Feb 2018 07:19:00 +0000

Paul Copan and I have been having an ongoing conversation revolving around the issue of violence done in God’s name and the corollary issue of violence and the Bible. Although we have very different views on these subjects, I am grateful for Paul’s willingness to engage with me, and also very much appreciate his respectful and kind demeanor. I hope to return that same tone of kindness and respect.

Most recently the conversation has centered around chapter 11 of Hebrews. Referring to Hebrews 11:31 which states “By faith the walls of Jericho fell, after the army had marched around them for seven days” Paul asked me if I thought the author of Hebrews believed that “the battle against Jericho was divinely commissioned and thus morally justified.” It’s worth noting that after the walls of Jericho fell, the book of Joshua states that “everyone charged straight in, and they took the city. They devoted the city to the Lord and destroyed with the sword every living thing in it—men and women, young and old, cattle, sheep and donkeys” (Joshua 6:20-21).

So I think it is without question that the author of Joshua did believe that the battle against Jericho was divinely commissioned. That seems to be the clear point of Joshua 6. Now, there is strong archeological evidence, based on high-precision radiocarbon dating, that shows that Jericho was completely uninhabited at the time of Joshua. So as Robert Hubbard concludes, echoing the current scholarly consensus, “There was no fortified city of Jericho for Joshua and Israel to conquer.” Since it is made-up that Joshua conquered Jericho, it is a very short logical step to conclude that it is equally made-up that God commanded him to.

However, let’s return to the author of Hebrews, who obviously did not know anything about archeology. Do I think that the author of Hebrews believed that the battle against Jericho was divinely commissioned and thus morally justified” as Paul asked?

No, I do not. Given the context of the central point the author of Hebrews is making in this chapter as well as in the following chapter, I would say it is clear that he is not trying to make the point that killing in God's name is morally justifiable, and in fact he is making the opposite point: The point of the entire chapter is encouraging believers who are suffering violent persecution to not resort to violence in their defense but to endure suffering in faith. Indeed, in the beginning of chapter 12 we read the author’s summary conclusion, “therefore, with all these examples before us... keep your eyes fixed on Jesus who looking beyond the shame of the cross, enduring it to get to the joy beyond it.” (Heb 12:1-2)

Paul seems to agree with me that the author of Hebrews is not using these OT examples to persuade his audience to similarly use violence in God’s name. He writes,

“there is a new people of God who are the interethnic body of Christ--no longer a national entity with civil laws, national enemies, etc. So taking up the sword to rise up against their Roman persecutors in the name of Christ would be misdirected.”

He however disagrees with my saying the author of Hebrews is making the “opposite point” noting that the author of Hebrews speaks favorably of these OT examples who “conquered kingdoms, . . . became mighty in war, put foreign armies to flight” (Heb 11:33-34). The implication is that the author of Hebrews is speaking favorably of war here, using it as a positive example. That’s true. However, I want to point out that in the next chapter this same author writes,

“My son, do not make light of the Lord’s discipline, and do not lose heart when he rebukes you, because the Lord disciplines the one he loves, and he chastens everyone he accepts as his son. (Heb 12:5– 6, quoting Prov 3:11– 12 from the LXX)

The Greek word translated above in the NIV as “chastens” is mastigoō which in fact means “to beat with a whip, flog, scourge.” It’s the same word Jesus used to describe his being flogged by the Roman centurions before the cross (Mt 20:19; Mk 10:34; Lk 18:33).

Now, if we want to conclude that because the author or Hebrews cites being “mighty in war” positively, we should therefore see this as a New Testament endorsement of war in the OT, we would have to equally conclude that because the author of Hebrews cites being “flogged” by your father positively, we should likewise need to see this as a New Testament endorsement of what would unmistakably be regarded today as criminal child abuse in the OT.

This is not how I would read Hebrews 12, nor is it how I would read Hebrews 11. What I try to do is look at what the point is that an author is trying to make, and focus on that. In chapter 12 the point is to hold on to the idea that even when we suffer, we can trust that we are loved by God. The point of chapter 11 is to look to the past and take heart, while enduring suffering in faith. The point of the author is not to endorse violence in the OT, nor is it his point to condemn it. His point is not to make any sort of evaluation of the past, but rather to tell his audience how they should live now. That is pretty much always the point of NT authors. The Apostle Paul has plenty of really critical things to say about the OT, but it is always in the context of telling his audience how to live and love now. So he tells them that if they are under the Law they will be under a “curse.” He compares it to slavery, says it is “death” and gave birth to “sin” and on and on, always doing this in the context of how we should live now. Paul is not concerned with saying whether or not Joshua or Moses were justified, because they are not his audience. Jesus is the same. Jesus says everything with the focus on how his audience lives and loves now. So he breaks the Sabbath to heal, he disobeys the command to kill the woman caught in adultery (even though he is the one without sin who could have cast the first stone) and forgives her instead. He says “You know the law says this... but I say to you now...”

So I will thus concede that the author of Hebrews does say positive things about people in the past killing in God’s name. However, I maintain that it is quite correct to say that his clear point, the take away, the reason he is writing, what he wants his audience to do now is not to kill in God’s name, but to do the opposite: “choosing to be ill-treated with the people of God" (Heb 11:25), "regarding abuse suffered for Christ to be greater wealth than the treasures of Egypt" (Heb 11:26), and even calling his audience “to resist to the point of shedding your blood” (Heb 12:1), rather than to respond with violence. Hebrews 11 is not an endorsement of OT violence, nor is it a critique of it. It is, as the NT authors always are, telling his audience how to live now. That is his point, that is his take-away message.

Do I see difficulty with telling people to “to resist to the point of shedding your blood”? Yes I do. I can see how a text like this could be used to justify people accepting oppression. But that is the tight-rope that we need to walk here, we need to work out how we can understand this way, which seems to me to be a very hard way, and put it into practice in a way that brings us closer to a loving and just world.

Paul Copan next addresses a question that I raised, where I proposed that we must not stop at what we can justify, but must go beyond this towards working to reform and repair and redeem. He writes,

“As for your other question, of course, a broader ethical discussion must go beyond justifying difficult moral exceptions. But that isn't the specific point that Matt Flannagan and I are tackling in our coauthored book. We are addressing a specific moral difficulty, and we do go into great detail about the matter of divine commands. In that setting, we raise the question, "Is taking innocent human life ever morally justifiable?" We give, I think, plausible examples (e.g., in the case of an ectopic pregnancy) that lead us to conclude that while it is an objective prima facie duty not to take innocent human life, it would not be morally absolute. (We point out too that this view is not idiosyncratic but is fairly widely accepted.)”

I note that here we are in agreement that there are some rare cases where taking innocent human life could be considered morally justified. I also acknowledge that this is a relatively widely accepted view. Paul then continues,

“Issues of hyperbole in ancient Near Eastern war texts, etc. aside, could it be that under certain less-than-ideal conditions, that an all-wise, all-good God might have overriding reasons for issuing these difficult commands?”

No, it could not. Absolutely, categorically, no. There is no possible reason that would justify going into a city and slaughtering infants and children. None. I dare say that it is universally accepted that killing infants is never ever okay. I strain to think of something that could possibly be more self-evidently immoral than this.

Paul next comments,

“I do think that John Goldingay is on to something when he writes: “Perhaps Deuteronomy [20:17-18] was only being realistic in recognizing the power of Canaanite temptation when Israelite faith in Yahweh was a newly budded flower.”

I cannot help but mention that the reasoning John Goldingay is using here for justifying these accounts is literally the same reasoning that the Nazis used to justify the Holocaust. I hope that gives all of us pause. The logic is that it is necessary to kill an two-year-old child and and six-month-old baby because otherwise they will grow up to morally corrupt the chosen people, making them impure. That is a truly horrific kind of logic. As we know from history, that kind of logic has led to many genocides.

I do not know John Goldingay, but I would not be surprised to find that he is a fine, loving person. I do know that Pastor John Ortberg has said something very similar, writing that “The beliefs of the Canaanites were a cancer that had to be removed from the land before the people of God could live there with any hope of health.” John Ortberg is well known for his commitment to care for the poor and the oppressed. So here’s a guy who is actively working to help the poor and the oppressed, a person who is exhibiting compassion and care, a person who is likely a much better person than I am. Yet they are calling people a “cancer.” I had the opportunity to speak with John Ortberg about this, and he graciously agreed that this was a fair critique.

I want to emphatically stress here that my point is not to claim that John Ortberg or John Goldingay or Paul Copan are bad people because of such comments, but just the opposite: I wish to underscore how easy it is for all of us as Christians— even the most loving among us— to feel the need to justify violence in the name of defending the Bible. In doing so we find ourselves seeking to justify things in the Bible, which in any other context we would without question wholeheartedly condemn.

I note again that the New Testament author’s focus was always on how people should live now. I would like to propose that this is how we need to read the Bible, too. That is the task of discipleship and also the task of ethics. While we can perhaps make ethical evaluations of things in the past, we cannot stop there. The most important question is to ask how we should live out the teachings we find in the Bible. I maintain that when we do this in a way that promotes acting in love towards others and ourselves we are reading the Bible rightly, and when we read it in a way that promotes harming or hurting others we are reading it wrong.

Paul, thank you for bearing with me as I work through this. I wish you God’s grace, peace, and loving care always.

A Reply to Paul Copan

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 04 Feb 2018 18:31:00 +0000

In my previous blog post, "Boyd and Copan's Unbelievable Debate, and the Problem of Unquestioning Obedience." I outlined some serious problems I see in Paul Copan's approach to interpreting Scripture. Paul was gracious enough to reply to me in a comment on the blog, which you can read here. Since my reply to Paul's comment was getting rather lengthy, I decided to post here:

Hi Paul, thanks for posting.

You write, “I'm incredulous that you attribute to me what I do not hold (e.g., that Mt. 15:3-4 is in force today).” I can certainly sympathize with that, as no one likes to feel misrepresented. However, I'd like to submit that, while difficult and uncomfortable, this could perhaps actually be good in that it allows us to really face what is at stake in the discussion.

I note that in your conversation with Greg, when he brought this up, you did not acknowledge that the idea of a command to execute children really troubles you, too. Perhaps it does, but you did not communicate that distress and struggle. You instead stressed (as you did again in your comment here) your view that “Jesus clearly seems to take this as divinely commanded under the Mosaic Law.” This left me with the impression that you had no problem with it since you believe Jesus endorses it. Or at least that, for you, the issue is not really whether or not you or I struggle with something as being alarmingly immoral, but simply whether it is commanded.

To state things differently, the issue is not that I am claiming that Paul Copan is endorsing such behavior today. I fully acknowledge that you do not, and if I implied otherwise, that was sloppy of me, and I apologize. The issue, i.e. what I am wanting to bring to light here, is that you are endorsing such behavior as morally justifiable if and when God commands it.

Indeed, if the reason you are not following this command to execute children is simply because it happens to not be in force today, and not because you think it would be morally abhorrent to do so, then you really should not feel incredulous. It would only make sense to feel incredulous if I claimed you endorsed something that you found morally abhorrent.

My suspicion however is that the reason you felt incredulous is because you actually do find it morally abhorrent (I mean seriously, who wouldn't?). I think it would be helpful if you could acknowledge that. Throughout your conversation with Greg I was waiting for something like that from you. He kept bringing up really troubling things like divine commanded genocide and so on. I never heard you say “Yes, Greg, your reaction is valid. I really struggle with that, too. Here's how I try to understand it, which is a bit different from how you do...” Instead your responses all seemed like none of this troubled you, like a tennis player volleying back every shot that comes over the net. Like it was a game of sorts. Again, perhaps this all does in fact trouble you, but I saw no indication of this.

To be clear, my wish that you would acknowledge and validate much more than you do the legitimacy of people's shock and moral outrage in regards to these examples of divine commanded killing of children and infants is not so much about the merits of your arguments, and has more to do with effective communication. It just works better to validate others' views and feelings--especially ones that are deeply morally troubling--and makes it more likely that they will be open to hearing yours. I think the lack of this, both in your books and interviews, is what leads me (perhaps incorrectly) to conclude that you have no moral problem with any of it. The impression given is that while immature Christians might struggle with such things, you demonstrate the model of the one who has it all figured out, the model of faith as certainty as an antidote to doubt. I would submit that when people are troubled by such profoundly immoral commands, it does not represent a weakness in their morals or faith, but instead is the result of adopting the heart of Jesus. That is, such moral doubts spring from developed empathy which in no way should be regarded as being in conflict with faith.

To be fair, you do speak theoretically of how we might find certain actions “troubling,” but this is in the context of arguing that we should do it anyway if it is a command. This brings me back to what I see as at the heart of the substance of your argument: The issue of making commands the sole criteria for moral evaluation. You make the point that there are some circumstances where it is morally justifiable to use coercive force. I fully grant that point. I can think of lots of examples myself. That, however, in no way means it logically follows that therefore it was okay to execute children for being disobedient or slaughter infants. The moral justification I believe you would give for both of these is that they were divine commands. As you say in Is God a Moral Monster? “Without God’s explicit command (and thus his morally sufficient reasons), attacking the Canaanites would not have been justified” (169). Again, the sole moral justification here is simply that it is a command. We don't know God's reasons, we just know the command. This is what I term the hermeneutic of unquestioning obedience.

You say that you seek to approach the OT as Jesus and the apostles did, but I don't think you actually are. Jesus taught his followers to not follow certain OT commands, rejecting the command “an eye for an eye” and teaching them instead to follow his way “but I say...” Paul told his churches that they were not under the law, i.e. not under commands, but under love. Jesus, when told that the law commands a woman be stoned to death, opted to disobey that command, and instead forgave her – which under the law there was absolutely no provision for with the sin of adultery. I could go on for pages and pages with examples of this, and if you are interested, I in fact do in my book Disarming Scripture.

The bottom line here is that both Jesus and Paul consistently approach faithfulness to Torah as being expressed not in blindly following the command, but rather in seeking to do what is loving and good and just – even if that meant going against a command. That's why Jesus was regarded by the authorities of his own religion as a lawbreaker. He prioritized the welfare of people over commands and laws. That's why he broke the Sabbath. That's why he touched the unclean (by law making himself unclean). That's why he fellowshipped with the “woman of ill-repute.” His understanding was that the purpose of the law was to lead us into loving action, and if in practice it turned out it was not leading to this, then our application of the law needed a course correction. As Jesus says “People are not made for the Sabbath, the Sabbath was made for people.” Likewise, the law is intended to be a means to help us to love, not something that binds us into doing things that are unloving and immoral. That's how I see Jesus and Paul's approach to the OT, and so I try to take that same approach with all of Scripture.

I hope from this is is apparent why I maintain that the way Jesus and Paul both interpreted and applied Scripture was the opposite of the hermeneutic of unquestioning obedience, and thus why I take such issue with your approach to Scripture.

Boyd and Copan's Unbelievable Debate, and the Problem of Unquestioning Obedience

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 28 Jan 2018 02:06:00 +0000

Premier Christian Radio's show "Unbelievable" recently hosted part 1 of a 2-part debate between Greg Boyd and Paul Copan, discussing Greg's book The Crucifixion of the Warrior God. Those of you who are familiar with my own debate with Greg on this topic (which you can read here, here, here and here) know I have had my own critiques of Greg's approach to the problem of violence in Scripture, so let me begin here by saying that in comparison to Copan, Greg and I are totally on the same page. I thought Greg did a great job presenting and defending his position, and I encourage folks to have a listen.

What I noticed more than anything listening to the two talk is that Boyd and Copan have very different ways of reading the Bible. Boyd speaks of the "humanness" of the Bible and how his understanding of the incarnation allows for him to see the Bible as divine, even with its flawed human parts. This is very much in line with the approach outlined by Pete Enns in his book Inspiration and Incarnation which I see as a healthy and realistic approach to Scripture. Indeed, Boyd pastorally warns that people who look for a "perfect" Bible set themselves up for disappointment and even a challenge to their faith by expecting the Bible to be something that it is not.

On the opposite side is Copan who exhibits what I describe as the hermeneutic of "unquestioning obedience" where one uncritically accepts everything the Bible says, no matter how unloving or morally irresponsible that may be. For example, in the debate the subject of the OT command to kill children who are disobedient to their parents is brought up (Matthew 15:4, citing Exodus 21:17 and Leviticus 20:9). Greg somewhat incredulously suggests that no one in their right mind could seriously propose that we follow that today. Paul Copan however argues that since Jesus called this a "command" this implies that Jesus endorsed it. QED: so does Paul Copan.

The idea that a 21st century theologian who is focused on ethics could with a straight face and zero sense of irony endorse the execution of children is of course just jaw-droppingly morally irresponsible--not to mention a truly atrocious reading of the passage (which I'll return to in a second)--but it illustrates what the hermeneutic of "unquestioning obedience" looks like in action. Copan seems oblivious to how morally problematic his reading is. That's the "unquestioning" part of the hermeneutic. What is the alternative hermeneutic that we see both Jesus and the Apostle Paul demonstrating in how they read Scripture? The hermeneutic of faithful questioning, and the key question is "how can I read this in a way that will result in loving action? In this case, as Greg points out, the key take-away is that actually killing children seems pretty obviously not the loving thing to do, and so Greg presses on to dig into the passage, trying to find a way to read it that does result in love. If you listen to the interview, I think you'll agree that Greg does a pretty good job with his reading.

Copan on the other hand does not wrestle to find the reading that results in love, but instead approaches the Bible with the assumption that everything it says is good, and thus looks for ways to argue that the profoundly immoral and unloving things we find in Scripture -- like killing disobedient children, like genocide, like cannibalism, like slavery, and on and on -- are actually good and right and God's will. More specifically, because the a priori assumption Copan works with is that everything in the Bible must be good, he encounters a problem when he gets to the New Testament. This is be because the NT as a whole, and the teaching of Jesus in particular, constitutes a healthy Jewish critique of the OT. I stress that this is a Jewish critique because Jesus here is following in the tradition found throughout the Old Testament of a healthy introspective critique of one's own religion and institutions and systems in the name of love. In other words, Jesus does not agree with everything in the OT, and in fact the OT often does not agree with itself. The prophets and Psalmists (not to mention Job) frequently question the law, and do so in the name of love. However, that is not in the realm of the possible for Copan. His assumption is that the Bible must harmonize, and so Jesus can't be disagreeing. The result of this reading (which is extremely common among neo-Calvinists) is to end up missing (kind of by design of how their hermeneutic functions) most of the major teachings of the NT in a pained attempt to read Scripture as if it all agrees. This is the approach identified in the interview as "synthesis" but in the end it mostly means accepting all the authoritarian and militaristic parts of the OT as good, and mostly ignoring the NT and the way of Jesus. In contrast to this, the aim of Boyd's "cruciform hermeneutic" is to do the opposite: He begins with the revelation of God in Christ crucified, and reads everything else in Scripture in that light.

What I want to stress here is that Copan's approach is not an exception, but characteristic of how most conservative evangelicals read Scripture. This is what conservative apologetics looks like: Faithfulness to Scripture is understood to mean justify everything in the Bible, no matter what.

Let me give another example from the interview of this. Boyd brings up the subject of the Amelikite genocide, where the Israelites slaughtered every living thing, including slaughtering infants, under the command to "show them no mercy." This for Boyd is a clear example of a deeply problematic violent text, and it's hard to imagine that anyone could possibly disagree with him. Copan's response is to pontificate on how sometimes we "need to defend the innocent." Sorry, what? Are we even having the same conversation? How in God's green earth is slaughtering infants "without mercy" an example of defending the innocent!? Again this is an example of how in Copan's hermeneutic absolutely everything is justified and defended. That's how faithfulness is understood.

It's not a very big step to go from this kind of cognitive dissonance in biblical interpretation, and carry this into the public sphere and politics. We recently have seen examples of this from folks like Jerry Falwell Jr, Franklin Graham, and most recently Tony Perkins, head of the Family Research Council who, in a truly mind-boggling interview (be sure to listen to the audio of the interview in the link above) justifies everything Trump does (including committing adultery with a porn star), saying--much to the apparent shock of the interviewer--that Perkins sees no problem morally at all in any of this for him as an evangelical.

So there you have it: Copan justifies everything in his authoritative book, and Perkins justifies everything the authority (here in the form of the President) does. It's not hard to see how one leads to the next. Within authoritarian evangelicalism, those in authority are typically unquestioned, and even more so the system itself remains unquestioned. When this makes its way into the public sphere as it has now with Trump and evangelicals' overwhelming support, the hermeneutic of unquestioning obedience has given birth to a Frankenstein monster. But in this version of the story the villagers can't seem to recognize the monster. As an article in the Washington Post puts it, "evangelicals have lost their gag-reflex," they have seemingly lost all ability to be introspective and reflect morally on who and what they endorse and represent. This is painfully obvious to everyone but conservative evangelicals themselves. They have come to champion all that is untrue, whatever is ignoble, whatever is not right, whatever is impure, whatever is unlovely, whatever is not admirable.

What we need to do instead, as morally responsible adults, is to learn how to reflect on our own lives, as well as reflect on our public institutions and systems and sacred texts. That kind of introspection is what allows us to grow and develop and heal and reform and repent. That is precisely what Jesus taught us to do.

The Psychology of Evil, Part 2: Moral Development

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 06 Aug 2017 20:52:00 +0000

In part 1 of this series, I introduced psychologist Roy F. Baumeister's five roots of evil: predation, dominance, revenge, sadism, and ideology, specifically covering the last two, sadism, and ideology. In this second part, I will discuss the remaining roots.

Predation

This term simply refers to primitive drives of greed and lust. This is evil as a means to an end. I want what you have, so I take it by force. This is the most simplistic concept of crime, dating back to the Ten Commandments (thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not covet...). It is a concept of right and wrong that any child can understand, and indeed is what children learn in Kindergarten (don't hit, use your words...). In other words, the antidote to this type of harm is the natural process of developing socially--learning to share, cooperate, and so on.

There is a connection here with social justice. For example the social dynamic in some U.S. inner cities is comparable to a failed state. When the police are not seen as serving and protecting, but are seen as a threat, the idea of "justice" is thus not entrusted to the state, and "gangs" take the role upon themselves. Since there is little hope of economic opportunity, people can feel that the normal social contract has failed them, and thus some feel compelled to take what they want by force. In other words, there is a correlation between individual justice and societal justice. The social contract which motivates a person to be social only makes sense if the society itself is indeed social. So if we want to see individual reform, an important part of this is working for societal reform. Impoverished areas all over the world lead to unstable and thus unsafe environments.

Dominance

Dominance is likewise related to moral development (or the lack thereof) and has a lot to do with one's self-esteem. We often think of a bully as someone with inflated self-esteem rather than low self-esteem. However, really what we have in a bully or egotist is a profoundly fragile self-esteem. They thus feel compelled to put other people down to feel superior. This fragile self-esteem is easily threatened, and the bully responds with acts of dominance -- put downs to belittle you, shame you, and in some cases with acts of violence.

The antidote again is moral/social development. For example, as I explained in Disarming Scripture, restorative justice programs like RSVP work with society's most violent men — wife beaters, murderers, and gang bangers — helping them to become self-reflective, developing empathy, and finding healthy ways of managing their emotions. These violent men learn for the first time how to maintain their own dignity and respect without demeaning or harming others. The results are striking: The RSVP program boasts a staggering 80% reduction of violent recidivism.

Additionally, the RSVP program has seen a dramatic reduction of inmate violence as well, not only making society safer, but making the guards safer as well. Usually in prisons we of course do the opposite. We attempt to teach people not to dominate... by dominating them. This leads to violence in prisons (which endangers both inmates and guards), as well as to a high recidivism rate, leading to a "revolving-door" prison system. That's because our prison system is about punishment rather than reform. It dehumanizes people. Restorative justice programs like RSVP offer some light here, but ultimately the view of society needs to change. As long as we think prison needs to be a place where "criminals should suffer" we will support the perpetuation of this spiral of violence. That brings us to our next root cause of evil, revenge.

Revenge

Revenge is about the cycle escalating retaliation. As humans, we naturally have an impulse for revenge. As Pinker says, "Revenge is an easily pushed button in everyone's brains." In other words, the drive for revenge is biological, related to our self-preservation.

For me, understanding this biological aspect was tremendously helpful. It meant that when I felt the desire for revenge when I was wronged, this did not mean that I was not really following Jesus, or that I still had "sin living in me" as Paul puts it. This is simply a biological reaction. It is biologically programmed into all of us as a means of self-preservation. The question of moral development, and the question that has to do with me being faithful to the way of Jesus, is what I then do with that drive for retaliation. Am I driven by it, or do I master it? Can I rise above it and look for a better way of resolving conflict? In other words, it's not the impulse, but what I do with it. Simply put, a big part of maturing is learning impulse control.

Of all of these above roots of evil, revenge may be the hardest to overcome for us because it is still seen as a virtue in many societies today. We think of predation as criminal, and dominance as characterizing bullies and tyrants. But we often still equate revenge with justice--especially in American society. So while we generally see predation and dominance as bad, revenge is the one root of evil that is still seen as a virtue. This cultural value is reinforced constantly by nearly every action movie ever made where revenge is made synonymous with justice. It takes a lot of moral imagination to rise above that, because it means rising above the moral imagination of our contemporary society.

One powerful movement away from this is the Truth and Reconciliation Commission which was was set up in South Africa after the abolition of apartheid in 1994 to deal with the violence and human rights abuses that had occurred from all sides. One of the key elements of the TRC was uncompromising truth-telling. So often our legal system is focused on the opposite. If you admit guilt you are punished, so the accused never admit what they did. A typical condition of a legal settlement is that the corporation makes no admission of wrong-doing. Similarly, there is the constant spin of politicians and corporations doing "damage control" in an attempt to hide wrong-doing. But when we are wronged, we humans desperately need to hear an admission of this. We need this more than we need punishment or payment. If that's true on an individual level, it is even more so on a societal level. That's why governments and corporations fight so hard against it.

Another important principle of the TRC was the idea of incomplete (retributive) justice. There was retributive justice, but not in a way that was proportionate to the crimes committed. In one sense it was just impractical to jail everyone who took part in Apartheid. So in the interest of healing the nation they gave amnesty to most, only punishing the most severe crimes. That may seem shocking to many of us. It can feel like they "got away with it." But I'd suggest the place we need to look is not to our immediate emotional response, but the long term results. As imperfect as this justice may feel, the practical question is whether this allow us to go on as a society. Does this allow us to heal? Does it allow us to move towards repair? Does it lead us away from harm? As Amos Oz, referring to the seemingly never-ending Palestinian/Israeli conflict, puts it,

"Tragedies can be resolved in one of two ways: there is the Shakespearean resolution and there is the Chekhovian one. At the end of Shakespearean tragedy the stage is strewn with dead bodies and maybe a sense of justice hovering high above. A Chekhov tragedy, on the other hand, ends with everybody disillusioned, embittered, heartbroken, disappointed, absolutely shattered, but still alive. I want a Chekhovian resolution, not a Shakespearean one."

Conclusion

Commenting on the 1961 trial of Adolph Eichmann, Hannah Arendt coined the now famous idea of the "banality of evil." Evil is boring and stupid. She applied this to one of the key figures of the Holocaust, and while many have taken issue with her assessment (there certainly were aspects of the holocaust that were sadistic) what we can perhaps agree on is that evil's roots are found in very basic characteristics that all of us are susceptible to. As Solzhenitsyn so powerfully said in The Gulag Archipelago, "the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being."

The three roots of evil we have explored here, predation, dominance, revenge all have in common a connection to basic human social development. In other words, the antidote to all of these evils is helping people to mature socially. As discussed in part 1, sadism is not actually a root, but rather an outgrowth of evil. This leaves us with the fourth root of evil, (authoritarian) ideology, which is a social framework that endorses harm as good. In other words, (authoritarian) ideology is a morally and socially underdeveloped view of the world which seeks to paint predation, dominance and revenge as good and admirable. We instead need to first recognize that all of us can easily fall prey to these egotistical and immature impulses -- we are not immune. Second, having embraced a morally and socially mature view of the world, we need to seek growth both as individuals and as a society together, seeking to grow towards helping rather than harming, towards repair rather than revenge.

The Psychology of Evil, Part 1: The Myth of Pure Evil

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 29 Jul 2017 04:04:00 +0000

Hannibal Lecter, Freddie Krueger, Dracula, Darth Vader, Cruella de Vil. We are all familiar with the myth of pure evil in Hollywood movies. It's a myth both because it serves as a literary device for the stories that shape how we see our world, and also because it is not true. It represents a naive cartoon understanding of what evil actually is.

Don't get me wrong, evil is real. People do really horrible, unspeakable, awful things to other people. If we can understand what leads a person to do that, then we can also discover how to move in the opposite direction, how we can grow and develop morally and socially--collectively and individually--towards being move loving, more just.

One of the key tenets of the myth of pure evil is other-izing, de-humanizing. When we refer to a person as a "monster" it is implied that they do not need to be treated as human. That allows us to treat them inhumanly, and then we ourselves commit evil actions, while thinking that we had no other choice, and perhaps telling ourselves that what we are doing is good and just. So we see our enemies as monsters and do horrible things to them, and they see us do that and think we are monsters, and thus feel justified in doing horrible things to us.

The problem with this cartoon depiction of evil is that it does not help us to break out of these cycles, and in fact contributes to keeping us locked in them. It's a fairy-tale world where we are the good guys and they are the bad guys. That's the opposite of being introspective and self-aware. What I hope to do instead is take a realistic and deep look at the reality of human evil that is a part of all of us, in the hopes of finding how we can move towards being good in a realistic and deep way.

Based on the work of psychologist Roy F. Baumeister, Steven Pinker, in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature identifies five roots of evil: predation, dominance, revenge, sadism, and ideology. In the first part of this series I will discuss the last two of these, sadism and ideology. When you think of ideology, think Isis. When you think sadism, think Charles Manson. Hollywood and the news media are obsessed with these stories of terrorists and psychopaths. I suspect they do this because it reflects our own obsession. These are the things of our real life nightmares. This is the kind of evil that leaves us baffled, perplexed and horrified. The problem is that the media tells us this story with very little reflection or insight because it’s an easy headline to write. “If it bleeds it leads” they say. This stokes our fear, rather than helping us to gain insight.

Let's begin with taking a look at sadism. Despite its frequent depiction in movie villains, sadism—taking pleasure in hurting and killing others--is actually quite rare. Baumeister explains that sadism is something that one develops into, much like drug addition. Studies have found that, of those actively engaged in violence, only around 5% become sadists. What keeps 95% of people from sadism, Baumeister says, is our sense of guilt.

Whether that sense of guilt is in-built, the product of culture, or a mix of both is not entirely clear. What we do know is that, as mentioned above, only a very small percentage of those participating in violence come to enjoy it. We also know that in the past it was common for people to do sadistic things as a culture. One example is the torture of animals for entertainment. Pinker gives several accounts of how animals, dogs and cats in particular, were brutally tortured as a means of public entertainment in Medieval times. This might indicate that where cultural taboos are absent, more people can develop sadistic tendencies unhindered by guilt.

The idea of someone taking pleasure in hurting others seems to represent what our cliché of pure evil looks like. Think of the Disney villain with his classic mwa-ha-ha-ha! maniacal laugh, and we have the cartoon version of sadism. The “thriller” movie version is only slightly more complex, sometimes it is even less complex. As mentioned previously, this cliché reflects our need to make sense of what seems "monstrous" to us. We watch these “monster movies” to try to process our fears. Unfortunately these movies typically re-enforce our ignorance. To be fair, many Disney movies (for example Zootopia) have actively moved away from that, addressing issues of racism and prejudice in a cartoon. I can’t say the same for action movies.

So what do we do with sadism? First we need to realize that even when the media give us the impression that it’s everywhere – every second headline seems to be about this. We know that it is actually very very rare. It’s also important to note that Baumeister concludes that sadism is not so much a root cause of evil, but rather a byproduct, entering the picture after evil (that is, actively torturing and killing others) is already in progress. It is something that a very small percentage of people have the potential for, perhaps we might even see it as a perversion of sorts. But it is not a root cause, it is not where evil starts. So if we are seeking to find the root causes of evil, the root that it grows from, we will need to look further.

This brings us to the second category: Ideology. Ideology and its connection to violence is something I have discussed at length in Disarming Scripture, and often on this blog. I refer to this as the way of “unquestioning obedience” and have often warned of its potential to lead to violence. As Pascal says, “Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.”

One might say that ideology acts as an antidote to moral conscience. It gets us to turn off our brains and hearts, to shut off our compassion and common sense, thinking that we are doing this “for God.” This can lead parents to harm the children they love, thinking that they are doing God's will or being true to the Bible. It has, as a matter of history, led many pious and idealistic people to commit horrific atrocities in the name of their god or political ideology.

It’s easy to look at groups like Isis and think that we would never be like that. However, studies like the infamous Milgram experiment reveal that the average person is disturbingly capable of hurting others in order to conform to authority. Most of us just go with the crowd -- whether that's in the halls of our high school, at our fundamentalist church, or somewhere else where the stakes are higher.

That's why it's so important to learn to think for yourself, to question, and perhaps most of all, to develop moral courage. If we don’t stand up in the little things, will we stand up for the big things? It’s easy to spot the evil of fanatical extremist ideology in another religion or another nation, and I certainly do not want to deny that this truly is evil. The true test however is whether we are able to stand up to authoritarianism and demagoguery when it wraps itself in our flag and claims our religion.

People often ask me how to deal with things like Muslim extremism. I have focused mainly on Christianity because that is my own faith. So I begin with looking at myself and my own tribe. But the answer to how to deal with Muslim extremism is the same as how we deal with Christian extremism. Fundamentalism is the same is any religion. The antidote to this non-thinking non-empathetic ideology is of course to learn how to have a thinking faith, how to be introspective and reflective, how to grow in empathy and moral maturity.

In understanding ideology as one of the roots from which evil grows, the key takeaway is to recognize that it is therefore not something that we only find in those monstrous bad guys “over there.” It is something that we all, as humans, are susceptible to. Put in the right circumstances we might find ourselves doing the same thing that the people in the Milgram experiment found themselves doing. Denying this does not make us immune. On the contrary, to the extent that we are unreflected about this potential in us, we are all the more susceptible to it. Only by facing these tendencies in us head-on, and actively deciding to move in the opposite direction, can we counter it. In the case of ideology that means, among other things, actively questioning authority and learning to think morally for ourselves. We need to practice it in the little things—among our peers, at school or work or church—if we hope to have the civil courage to take a stand for bigger things.

Blessed Are the Peacemakers: Beyond Prohibition or Justfication

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 02 Jul 2017 00:50:00 +0000

Language matters, and in fact the vocabulary we use can shape a conversation, defining what we talk about. I see this happening among those of my fellow evangelicals who advocate for nonviolence, both in how we understand faithfulness to the way of Jesus and the character and way of God revealed in Christ. While I share this commitment to nonviolence as an essential part of Christian discipleship, I would like to propose that the term “nonviolence” itself is restricting the pursuit of this goal and causing us to get stuck. I want to propose instead that we need to learn to speak of peacemaking.

For many evangelicals, when they speak of their commitment to nonviolence as well as their understanding of God’s nonviolence, this is understood primarily in terms of something you abstain from; it is a commitment to not do something; it is a prohibition. Some examples of this would be Greg Boyd, Preston Sprinkle, and perhaps to a lesser extent my buddy Brian Zahnd.

This is a position that has a lot of weight behind it. The early followers of Jesus (for the first few centuries, pre-Constantine) were in fact known for refusing to defend their lives with violence, and associated this with faithfulness to Jesus. That’s the whole idea of being a martyr for Jesus.

Now, does that mean that we as Christians today should not defend ourselves when our lives are in danger? Some would say yes. They would understand Jesus’ teachings as forbidding the use of violence. Nonviolence here is primarily about what you are not permitted to do, similar perhaps to saying “no sex outside of marriage.”

Let me be clear that I do not disagree with this commitment, and in fact share this commitment to abstaining from violence personally. I also fully appreciate the merits of the position, both in terms of the New Testament witness and the witness of the martyrs. In fact, my intent is not to critique or disagree with this position, but rather my aim is to help it. I observe that this particular approach -- which is a position which I have often found myself seeking to defend -- has unwittingly resulted in getting us stuck, and I’d like to propose a way to get us unstuck. To do that, I’d like to change the conversation from a focus on saying what we will not do, and move towards saying what we will do. If we say that we will not use violence as a means to bring about justice, then how do we propose that justice should be brought about? If we will not use violence as a means to bring about peace and safety, then how do we propose to do that?

Simply focusing on what we abstain from does not address these important questions. So I want to propose that instead of speaking about non-violence (in terms of a non action, a prohibition, a thing we don’t do) we instead speak of peace-making which implies concrete action, making peace.

To state this differently, the question we should be asking is not “is violence justified?” but “how can we reduce violence?” Think about all the what-if scenarios those who endorse non-violence always find themselves needing to justify: What if you were police during a mass shooting? Would violence be justified then? Those who take the stance of a total commitment to non-violence find themselves presented with these very emotional hypothetical scenarios, with the implication being that “of course surely then you would see violence as justified, wouldn’t you?!”

A corollary to this are the endless biblical debates as to whether or not Jesus and/or the New Testament ever endorses violence. What about those two swords? What about that one thing Jesus said? Notice again that the focus is again on whether violence is ever justified.

The dynamic I see happening here is that there is a concern that if a person committed to non-violence admits that in these extreme cases violence would be justified, or admits that Jesus just might endorse violence in some cases, this will lead to a slippery slope where more and more violence is justified, until eventually just about any violence is justified. Unfortunately, I think this concern is well founded. There is a strong narrative, particularly in the USA, that lethal violence is not a last resort but more and more it is the first and only resort. We not only see violence being justified, both in movies as well as from conservative preachers, we see it being glorified by them. Violence is portrayed as holy, noble, patriotic, heroic... to the point that it is beyond question.

The slippery slope fear is real. So in reaction people will double-down in a teetotalling sort of way, insisting that violence is never justified. Often here an authoritarian appeal is made to Scripture. Jesus clearly forbids it, it is argued, so it doesn’t matter whether nonviolence is an effective means of bringing about good or not, violence is just forbidden, period.

So we have this dynamic where each side gets more and more extreme. I think the way to get out of it is to change the question. Instead of asking “is violence ever justified?” we should instead ask “what can we do here to reduce violence?” Consider that if I myself refuse to commit violence, that does not in itself do anything to reduce violence in my community or world. So if I want to have less domestic violence, less mass shootings, less terrorism, and so on, what can we do to move towards that? That’s the question we need to be asking.

In regards to the question of whether violence is ever justified, I will take the middle ground and say yes, it is in some cases. I think for instance that the police officer who shoots an active shooter on a rampage is doing the best thing in that situation. In fact, I’m frankly glad they do it, and I do not feel any moral conflict for saying so. Saying that however does not in any way stop me from wanting to find ways to reduce violence in my country and world, including working to reform the systemic problems that lead to police shooting unarmed people of color. I’m glad we have police to protect us in situations like mass shootings, but those police officers are just fallible humans like me, and are just as susceptible to bias as any of us are. They therefore need to be educated in tools of conflict resolution and trained how to deescalate dangerous situations. They need to work to develop positive relationships of mutual trust and respect with the communities they serve. Because of this lack of training we not only have people not wanting to call 911 for a domestic dispute for fear that their spouse will be shot, we also have police officers in more danger because they only know how to escalate, rather than deescalate dangerous situations. So I want to get away from this hero bravado and recognize that these are just humans with a difficult job, which I am grateful for. They need to be provided with the training and tools to do that job the best way possible.

Notice that the position I am advocating is messy and imperfect. That's hard to take for those of us who come from the evangelical focus on being "100% sold out for Jesus" and who yearn for perfection and purity in our lives. It is not the story of "before I was bad, but now I've seen the light and am completely healed and free!" I'm sure the idealistic teen version of myself would not have liked this. I would have seen it as compromising, selling out. I love my teen self, but I'd hope that he would learn as he grows and matures that if we insist on perfection or nothing, we usually end up getting nothing. That does not mean as an adult that I have given up on the goal, but it does mean that I recognize that it takes lots of little imperfect steps to get closer to that goal. So I hope I can act to make a world that is a little less violent today than it was yesterday, and continue working to make it even less violent tomorrow. It's a slow march towards justice and love.

I think we can find a useful parallel to the issue of violence in looking at divorce. One could easily take Jesus’ words to say that divorce is categorically forbidden. On a low moral level we ask questions of permission and prohibition. So the question here becomes, “Am I allowed to get a divorce or not?” But the deeper and more important question to ask is “What do we need to do to have a good and healthy marriage?” and more specifically “How can we break out of our patterns of hurt and conflict, and restore trust, and the joy, surprise, and closeness in our relationship again?” After all, I think we can also all agree that no one likes divorce. It’s a painful and tragic experience. So the goal is to see if it is possible to help marriages to be restored. This is an approach that is not naive or idealistic, but very aware that our human experience is one of imperfection and struggle. It begins right in the middle of that and seeks to move us towards love.

I know a thing or two about this specific issue because my wife is a licensed psychotherapist specializing in marriage counseling. As a couples counselor she would agree that in some situations divorce is the best option. However, part of her job is to help people to heal their marriages, getting past wounds and hurts, in order to avoid divorce whenever possible. That doesn’t mean staying in an unhealthy marriage, it means working to make the marriage healthy and loving. Similarly with violence, if the question is “can it ever be justified” I will answer: Yes, it can. So can divorce. So we can stop with all those hypothetical what-if scenarios, and we can stop with all the unproductive biblical arguments about Jesus and swords. Let’s move beyond that, and instead all agree that even if divorce and violence can both be justified, we’d all nevertheless like to live in a world with less divorce and with less violence. Not only that, we’d all like to live in a world with happy loving marriages, and with people living in security and freedom. In order to get to that, the kinds of questions we need to be asking are therefore: How can we work to mend broken relationships? How can we work to resolve conflict? How can we work to bring about social justice? How can we promote safety? How can we reduce harm? How can we become ministers of reconciliation and peacemakers in the world?

I think changing the question from “is violence ever justified?” to “how can we reduce harm and work for good?” offers us a way to break out of these spirals of biblical debates and hypothetical scenarios, as well as to avoid painting ourselves into a corner of an extreme position of teetotalling nonviolence backed by authoritarian appeals to Scripture. Instead of going in circles or getting stuck we can move towards working for peace and justice and love—working to reduce harm by promoting the way of Jesus and the four “R”s of the gospel: reconciliation, redemption, reform, restoration.

At the same time, it allows those on the edge to be able to take steps towards this way without feeling that they need to forsake their love of family and desire to protect them from harm. It may be for many of us that we can only get to asking how we can work to resolve conflict and reduce violence after we first allow ourselves to say that violence in the case of things like self defense is a justifiable and understandable response. In regards to self-defense, I totally understand why a person would want to defend themselves or their loved ones. So would I. You will get no condemnation from me there. But what I do want us to try to do is think together about what we might be able to do to promote peace and resolve conflict. How can we work towards that, while of course caring for the safety and well-being of everyone involved? So perhaps we need to say to each other, “I can’t condemn you for resorting to violence in self-defense. I might do the same if I were in that situation. But let’s work together to see if we can find a better way. Let’s find out how we can actively work to lessen violence, resolve conflict, and restore relationships. Let’s learn how to work for justice and peace.”

Wealthcare: Attacking the Weakest Among Us

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 25 Jun 2017 19:42:00 +0000

Our faith matters most in how it affects the way we treat others, especially the least. Jesus stressed this over an over. Blessed are the poor. Blessed are the children. In other words, we need to care for the weakest among us, the vulnerable.

Alyssa Mastromonaco, former Deputy Chief of Staff for Obama, speaking on Pod Save America last Thursday (June 22, 2017), lays out who will be hurt by the Senate health care bill:

49% of all births
64% of all nursing home residents
30% of all adults with disabilities
40% of all poor adults
39% of children
76% of all poor children
60% of all children with disabilities

She sums this up by saying "Way to go Republicans, literally attacking the weakest among us. If you want to find a purpose for government it should be protecting the weakest among us."

I think Jesus would agree, and I hope you do, too. But it's not just about caring for the weak among us. The fact is, there are things in this bill that will likely hurt you, including not covering for your preexisting conditions (or only at prohibitive cost), and caps on maximum spending for your medical expenses.

I'm sure that many Republican Senators are good people at heart who did not go into government to take away health care from children. But there is a lot of pressure on them right now to vote "yes" on this bill, and so they need to know that the people who voted for them don't want this, and that they will support them in having the moral courage to care for the weak, and to do what is right.

So if you live in a State with a Republican Senator, please call them this week and urge them to vote no. The Senate will likely vote on this bill this Thursday, so time is of the essence. You can call the the U.S. Capitol switchboard at (202) 224-3121 and a switchboard operator will connect you directly with the Senate office you request. If you don't live in a State with a Republican Senator, please urge your friends or family who do to call their Republican Senator.

I realize that many of you may want to avoid talking politics with your extended family in these polarized times. I know also that it can feel like a neverending stream of one horrible position after another, which can be almost numbing. But this bill tops it all. It would have far graver impact, harming more people, than anything else that has happened so far in this administration. So if there's one thing that is worth entering this awkward conversation with relatives for, this is it. This goes way beyond any particular political position, and comes down to our most basic humanity and morality.

Judge for Yourself

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 03 Jun 2017 23:43:00 +0000

Last time I discussed how to interpret Scripture like Jesus did, and concluded that unlike the way many of us learned to interpret Scripture in seminary (something called “exegesis,” consisting of discerning what the intended meaning or message of the passage is) the task of interpretation cannot stop there. Reading the Bible like Jesus requires going further, asking with Jesus whether a passage fulfills the intended telos of love.

Let’s consider the paradigm of exegetical interpretation. Here the paradigm is that of the objective scientist. The biblical scholar seeks to approach the biblical text the way an archeologist approaches a dig. Their aim is to uncover the meaning by examining the evidence. They do not offer any sort of evaluation of this, they simply reconstruct and report. In a sense it can be seen as a form of translating.

In other words, exegesis by definition does not involve making any evaluation at all about whether the content of a text is good or not, and instead simply focuses on what it says. Consequently, while biblical scholarship has helped us to understand how to read texts in their proper context, it has for the most part ignored— and in many ways, actively resisted— dealing with the ethical issues raised by these texts, doing so on academic grounds. To the extent that this is true (and there does seem to be some movement towards correcting this) it means that seminaries neglect one of their core missions, which is to equip future pastors to guide people in how to interpret and apply Scripture as a moral guide in their lives.

If the paradigm of exegetical interpretation is that of the lab scientist, I’d like to propose that we can understand the way Jesus and Paul interpret Scripture in the context of how our judiciary interprets the laws of our country. In our legal system, the role of the courts is to interpret the laws. On a very basic level this involves establishing guilt or innocence. But it does not stop here. The higher courts also evaluate the laws themselves, for example finding that a particular law is unconstitutional. In other words, the Constitution is seen as the telos or aim of the law, and thus laws can change and even be overturned if they are found to conflict with that aim.

Here the concept of interpreting the law is not simply a matter of rigidly applying what it says to do, but of evaluating it to see whether that law serves the purpose for which it is intended, and further to see whether it upholds the deeper intent of the Constitution. In the case of Jesus and Paul, the parallel to the Constitution is not the written Torah or even the ten commandments; their “Constitution” is love.

Paul proposes that there is a higher law than the written Torah, and that is the law of love. He uses various ways to describe this, saying “you are not under the law, but under grace” (Ro 6:15), and “Christ is the culmination of the law” (Rom 10:4), and “Whoever loves others has fulfilled the law… Love does no harm to a neighbor. Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law” (Rom 13:8-10), and “If you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law” (Gal 5:18). This all points to a common denominator of Spirit-led Christlike love and grace as Paul’s “Constitution” by which he then interprets the law. We might sum this all up by saying that the goal of love is the core of how Paul interprets and applies Scripture, “For the entire law is fulfilled in keeping this one command: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself’” (Gal 5:14). The same can be said for Jesus, “’Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” (Mat 22:37-40).

You may recall that Brian McLaren has said that the Bible is “not a constitution but a library.” I agree that the Hebrew Scriptures are like a library in that they contain many conflicting visions of the good, rather than one guiding theme. We get it wrong therefore when we try to read the Old Testament as a way of interpreting Jesus, because it is simply not possible to synthesize these conflicting moral visions into one. However I would add to this that while the Hebrew Scriptures are not a “Constitution” for Jesus, love does function as his Constitution. That is, love is the guiding principle that drives how Jesus (and Paul) interprets and applies the law. Only to the extent that we apply Scripture in a way that leads to love can we claim to fulfill it.

That means that when Jesus overturns the way of an eye for an eye, repudiating that command along with the principle of retaliation behind it, replacing it with the way of reconciliation and redemption, he is in fact fulfilling the aim of Torah. In other words, he frequently seems to break commands (not following an eye for an eye, healing on the Sabbath, touching the unclean, not stoning the adulterous woman as the law commands) in order to fulfill the aim of Torah. It was for this reason that it was necessary for him to say “do not think that I have come to abolish the law, but to fulfill it,” because looking at how he broke the commands of the law (and yes, he did technically break them), one can see how those with a different understanding of what it means to apply the law could have gotten the wrong impression. Indeed, the Gospels tell us that Jesus was frequently accused by the “keepers of the law” of being a lawbreaker and blasphemer. Seen in the context of Jesus interpreting Scripture as our higher courts do, perhaps we should not say that Jesus “breaks” laws when he overturns them, just as we would not say that the Supreme Court breaks laws when it overturns them. Basically, the “keepers of the law” see Jesus as a criminal who either keeps or breaks the law, when the Gospel writers present Jesus instead as a judge who interprets the law, which includes the authority to overturn or repudiate. Doing so is what it means to fulfill it. Just as we are all called to be priests in Christ, we are also all called to be judges.

It may surprise and even threaten some readers that I say above that Jesus overturns commands. You may have been taught that Jesus perfectly kept the law and was thus sinless. However, the Gospels tell us that the way that Jesus in fact fulfilled the law was sinless, and demonstrated that God’s love involved “breaking” commands. Again, understood in our framework of higher courts interpreting laws, and at times overturning them, Jesus is showing us how to judge what is good. As Paul writes,

“The person with the Spirit makes judgments about all things, but such a person is not subject to merely human judgments, for, ‘Who has known the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?’ But we have the mind of Christ.” (1 Cor 2:15-16)

I want you to fully appreciate what Paul says above. Paul imagines an interlocutor’s objection who quotes from the Bible, thus challenging Paul “who are you to question God’s Word?!” Paul counters this objection by insisting that those of us who have the “mind of Christ” are qualified to make such judgments. That is, those of us who have learned to think like Jesus are the ones who are able to make these judgments about what is good.

This type of legal interpretation, just as is the case with our higher courts, involves an evaluation of the law itself in relation to its intended purpose of leading us to loving action. Just as a court may declare a law to be unconstitutional, we are in Christ likewise enabled to judge whether a law itself, or an interpretation of the law (i.e. how it is applied in our lives) is Christlike or not. Some may balk at our being empowered by Christ to act as judges over the written law, but I remind you of Paul’s words regarding believers involved in legal disputes,

“Do you not know that we will judge angels? How much more the things of this life! (1 Cor 6:3)

That is of course a lot of responsibility, and is not something to be taken lightly. It is something we should do together in relationship and community, taking special care to listen to the voices of the least as we do, and it is something that calls for much wisdom, maturity, and perhaps especially humility. It is the task of developing an adult faith, the task of taking moral responsibility for our lives, including taking responsibility for how we interpret Scripture.

We should not kid ourselves in thinking that we will be able to do this perfectly. We will make mistakes and get things wrong, even with the best of intentions, even with the aim of love. That is why the process of interpretation as ethical evaluation is an ongoing task.

Here I think it is instructive to understand how Jewish interpretation has developed. While Christians look to the New Testament as the guide to how to understand the Hebrew Scriptures, Jews look to the Talmud. A big part of the Talmud consists of records of rabbis debating how to interpret various parts of the Torah. There is a saying “ask two Jews a question and you will get three answers” and this reflects the nature of how these debates are presented in the Talmud. Each argument is placed side by side, and the reader needs to evaluate them all. Meaning that while the Talmud has the role of interpreting the Torah, it does not do so by giving a definitive answer, so much as it invites the readers into the process of thinking through these issues.

We have as Christians, to a large extent, been taught not to think, told that it is wrong to think for ourselves, and that we instead must simply submit ourselves to God’s written word (often meaning to submit to what our morally underdeveloped authoritarian pastor says the Bible says). Jesus and Paul, along with the prophets, and later the rabbinical debates recorded in the Talmud, all invite us instead to learn how to think morally. That is hard work, but it is the work of a mature, responsible, adult faith.

How to Read the Bible like Jesus and Paul (Your Seminary Prof Wont Like It)

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 30 May 2017 01:32:00 +0000

In seminary one learns to interpret Scripture in order to best arrive at the authorial intent. This is known as exegesis. So we look at all the evidence, including cultural background, understanding the original languages, and so on, to arrive at what Isaiah or Moses or Paul meant. We are taught to avoid what is called "eisegesis" which is where you read your own values and agendas into the text.

As Richard Hays and many other scholars have noted however, this is not what Paul or Jesus are doing when they interpret the Hebrew Scriptures. This conclusion is frankly inescapable. Both Jesus and Paul frequently interpret Scripture in ways that so obviously override the clear intent of the original author that it is impossible to imagine this is accidental.

The question then is, what is driving their interpretation? How would we evaluate whether it is a "good" or "right" interpretation if they are not trying to follow authorial intent? If we wanted to read the same way they do, how would we similarly evaluate whether we are arriving at a good or right interpretation?

This is the kind of question that gets scholars like Richard Longenecker confused. He recognizes that Paul is doing this, but suggests that we cannot do it ourselves. In part, his argument is that Paul has a sort of apostolic "free pass" to do whatever he wants when he reads the Bible, but we do not. A second part is that Longenecker sees that this type of reading was regarded as compelling at the time, but he claims it would not be compelling to people in our time.

I'd like to propose that the problem is that scholars like Longenecker don't really get what Jesus and Paul are doing, and so the interpretive methods of Jesus and Paul just seem -- to use the term famously employed by E.P. Sanders -- "weird." It appears to be a sort of random just-make-it-up-as-you-go-along kind of approach. Understandably, he does not want us to read like that. Nor do I. But again I think the problem is not that what Jesus and Paul are doing is actually random, but that it looks that way to Longenecker.

Richard Hays argues against Longenecker that we should adopt this "creative" reading of Paul and Jesus. The problem is that Hays does not really ever identify what they are doing, other than that it is "imaginative" and "creative," which sounds great, but does not provide us with the means to follow them in this. Even if we are thinking of this as a form of art (as the terms "imaginative" and "creative" imply), as any practicing artist can tell you, art is not random. You need to understand what you are trying to accomplish, and how you will use your medium to achieve that.

To get to this, I find the work of James Dunn helpful. Dunn identifies the baseline interpretive approach (i.e. the hermeneutic) of Jesus as interpreting so as to lead us deeper into love. I think it can be argued that this telos (aim) of love is equally the baseline hermeneutic of Paul as well.

So how does this love-telos work into Jesus and Paul's approach to interpreting Scripture? What we can observe is that they both read Scripture so that the result will be that the way it is interpreted leads us into more compassion, more goodness, more reflection, more mercy. At times this leads them to take an idea in a new direction, and at other times this leads them to take it in the opposite direction of the original author. Sometimes it even seems that they take it in a direction that appears to completely ignore what the original author had in mind.

To the question of "Is this what was originally intended when this was written?" their answer would be "Who cares?" (that is, this was not something they were focused on at all, contrary to those doing exegesis today, hence their indignant confusion at the question). Instead, they are asking "If we did this, would it result in abundant life? Would doing this lead to goodness and restoration? Will this lead to compassion and justice and wholeness in my life and the lives of others?" If the answer to these questions is "Yes!" then that is what makes the interpretation right. Here right interpretation and right-eousness become synonymous. It is however not exegesis. It requires, as Hays says, creativity and imagination because we need to know how to understand and build upon something, taking it higher. For that we need to know what the aim is (the aim is love) and we need to know how to take things a step further in that direction.

This is something that needs to be evaluated in conversation, and in lived community. I say here "lived community" because it is not simply theoretical, but practical. The question is, "when we walk this out, can we observe that this leads to love and flourishing? Or does this in fact lead to harm?" We can only observe that by living it out in relationship, not simply as an abstract theory. That goes for how we interpret the words of Jesus and Paul, and it goes for how we evaluate their reading of Scripture as well.

For example, when Jesus asks, "Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath?" and then a bit more broadly asks "Is it lawful to do good on the Sabbath, or evil, to save a life or destroy it?” (Mk 3:4) we can see Jesus applying this approach. The question is not so much "What does the command say?" nor is it "What is the tradition of interpretation here?" In this case the answer would have been that unless this was a life-threatening situation (which it was not) one must wait until after the Sabbath to heal. Jesus argued instead that the way we honor this command is to do all the good we can. That is the right interpretation because it leads us to right-eousness which is another way of saying towards good-ness. You might say the way Jesus and Paul read Scripture is to ask "Does this way of interpreting lead to doing good or evil, does it save life or destroy it?"

So with this example of how Jesus used this love-telos approach to interpret Scripture in mind, let's see how we might apply that love-telos approach with how we interpret the teachings of Jesus. I frequently hear people make the argument that since Jesus got mad and used a whip once, therefore we can just ignore all that stuff about nonviolence and love of enemies he taught. If we evaluate this approach using the criteria of the love-telos approach, we would need to ask: does reading in this way serve to challenge me to go deeper into the way of Jesus, or does it simply serve to let me find a way to side-step the hard teachings of Jesus and feel justified in doing so? I'd say that the latter is the case and that this is an example of what Bonhoeffer might have called "cheap discipleship." It's a reading that gets us off cheap, that does not challenge us, does not change us, does not move us towards love.

To ask the question slightly differently, we might ask whether there is a better way to read Jesus besides this "cheap" way? Is there a way to interpret the words of Jesus that will lead me to a more costly following of Jesus and his way? Is there a way to read this that would do a better job at challenging me to move deeper into the way of compassion and forgiveness, and moving me closer to justice and making things right in the world? If so, then that is the right interpretation, or perhaps I should say, it is the righter interpretation. We evaluate the rightness of an interpretation on the fruit it bears. That is not a static process where we find, once and for all, the one right way of reading. Rather it is something that needs to grow and develop, just like a living thing does. So if in practice I find that I need to modulate that righter interpretation a bit in order to make it more loving, then we arrive at an even righter-er interpretation -- each time developing it further, expanding and growing towards love. That's what I see Jesus and Paul doing as they interpret and apply Scripture, and that's how I plan to read them, too. Jesus says, "Very truly I tell you, whoever believes in me will do the works I have been doing, and they will do even greater things than these." That work, my friends, is the work of love. So let's get to work.

The Crucifixion of the Warrior God and the Myth of Redemptive Violence

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 13 May 2017 19:10:00 +0000

This is part four of a series I have been doing on Greg Boyd’s Crucifixion of the Warrior God. Here are links to the other parts: Part1, Part2, Part3. Greg has also responded to these.

Volume I of Greg’s book lays out the foundation of his “Cruciform Hermeneutic,” and Volume II proposes how to apply that hermeneutic in a four-part “Cruciform Thesis.” The first part of Greg’s four part thesis is the principle of Cruciform Accommodation, which I discussed in my previous post. I noted there that I saw some issues with how Greg is understanding the cross that I did not really unpack there. My aim is to address that in this post now, focusing on the second part of Greg’s thesis, which he terms Redemptive Withdrawal.

The Cross as Punitive Violence

The Principle of Redemptive Withdrawal is grounded in an understanding of the cross where “the Son bore the judgment of the sin we deserved” (768). This reflects a penal substitutionary understanding of the cross, the key term here being “penal,” meaning punishment. I should note that Greg does not like the term penal substitution, and does make a point of stating that he rejects the popular form of this doctrine where “the Father had to vent his wrath against sin in order to embrace sinners” (796), arguing instead that “God’s punishments are always redemptive in intent” (785). In other words, he still holds to an understanding of the atonement rooted in punitive justice (the idea that things are made right through violent punishment), but sees the intent of the violence as restorative (or as Greg calls it, "redemptive"), rather than as retributive.

I'll return to the idea of violence being “restorative” later, but for now let's simply focus on the notion of the cross being understood in terms of punitive justice, and what this understanding looks like when it is applied as the lens to interpret OT passages which view natural disasters, genocide, and cannibalism as acts of God's judgment. Despite having earlier declared such depictions to be “sinful” and false representations of God, using this punitive understanding of the cross Greg now declares that a cruciform reading of these violent accounts does see them as ultimately good and just. For example, speaking of the biblical flood, he states, “this flood reflects a genuine judgment of God. The only thing that conflicts with God’s revelation on the cross is the manner in which this author ascribes the violence in the judgment directly to God” (526).

This focus constitutes the “withdrawal” element in Greg’s principle of Redemptive Withdrawal. Greg affirms that the violent accounts are correctly seen as God’s just judgment for sin, as the texts claim. He only denies the claim of the text that God was directly involved in committing the violence. Instead, he maintains that God simply “withdraws” his protection, allowing other “agents” to commit the violence, thereby enacting God’s judgment for sin. Speaking of the Canaanite genocide he writes,

“God decided, with a grieving heart, to withdraw his protective presence... Reflecting the same Aikido-like strategy that was employed on the cross, God would now use the evil of the Israelite’s disobedient reliance on the sword to punish the evil of the Canaanites wickedness and idolatry” (982).

Note that Greg refers to using other agents (in this case humans) to carry out God’s violent judgment in the form of genocide as “Aikido-like” here. What does he mean by this? Greg clarifies that while Aikido practitioners have the goal “of bringing as little harm to their opponent as possible” this minimizing of harm is apparently not something that God is concerned with. Greg explains, in contrast to these Aikido practitioners, “God is not adverse to allowing evil-doers to suffer the full destructive consequences of their own sin.” He further clarifies “The point of the Aikido analogy is that God himself never needs to actively engage in violence” (769, n6).

At this point one may be wondering how any of this can possibly be seen as congruent with the nonviolent understanding of God that Boyd laid out so carefully as the foundation of his Cruciform Hermeneutic throughout volume I of this work. Greg explains that based on his understanding of the cross as an act of divine punishment, “it becomes evident that not only can a nonviolent God judge sin, but the ‘wrath’ of this nonviolent God against sin is no less severe than it would be if God did engage in violence. It is just that whatever violence is involved... is carried out by created agents” (782).

What we can observe here is that when a cruciform reading is shaped by a punitive understanding of the cross, the result is to affirm the most extreme violence (global flood, genocide) as being just and good judgments. The resulting “nonviolent” God is therefore just as violent as the warrior god. The only substantive difference is that Greg apparently believes that God is absolved from any moral responsibility by not directly committing the violence entailed in these acts of divine judgment. As he puts it, “the distinction between what God does and what he merely allows removes culpability from God” (720, n29).

I disagree. Mob bosses and war lords commonly have people assassinated and slaughtered without directly participating in the killing. We would certainly not consider them innocent. Anticipating this type of objection, Boyd imagines that someone might compare these “indirect” judgments of God to a person unleashing “a rabid pit bull” on someone (902). That person would be responsible for the harm inflicted by the dog, even though they were not personally involved in the attack. Likewise, “if God unleashed violent nations for the purpose of having them afflict another nation, one could argue that he is responsible for the suffering that the violent nation brings about” (902).

Acknowledging that this is a “formidable objection,” Greg offers a four-point response. First, he argues, since sin is a matter of “pushing God away,” God’s withdrawal must be seen as “a decision to give people what they want” (903), and one does not ask to be attacked by the pit bull. The second point Greg makes is “this is what they deserve” (903) so it is a just punishment (think genocide as you read that). Third, God inflicts his violent judgments “in the hope that their suffering will teach them what God’s mercy will not” (904), although in the context of God’s judgment consisting of the “slaughter of entire populations” (983) it’s hard to imagine how that teaching moment is supposed to work exactly when they are all dead. Forth, he argues that “since God’s very being is unsurpassable love, the pain he experiences when people are afflicted, even when they deserve it, is unfathomably greater than the pain experienced by others who love these people, or by the people themselves” (904).

So in sum: (1) You asked for it. (2) You had it coming. (3) This will teach you, and (4) This hurts me more that it hurts you. While this may sound like some people’s fathers, it sounds nothing like the one to whom Jesus prayed “Our Father who art in heaven.” Note, too, that all of these points involve arguing that the violence is justified, and none address whatsoever the issue of moral responsibility.

The analogy of the pit bull is apt because, as Greg notes, the nations in their blood lust often went overboard in their violence, much like a “rabid pit bull” is completely out of control once you “withdraw” your hand from its leash. Far from being absolved from responsibility, I think it is pretty clear that were a parent to unleash a rabid pit bull on a disobedient child, this would be morally exponentially worse than it would be for them to beat the child with their own hand (which is of course also bad). So I must reject this concept of “withdrawal” as a means of avoiding responsibility. It simply does not hold water. God is morally responsible for what God does, whether directly or indirectly, just as we are.

Moreover, I maintain that the picture of God in Christ crucified is not one of withdrawal because of our sin, but just the opposite. It is a picture of "God with us," God in Christ entering into all of our brokenness and darkness and hurt. It is God in Christ “becoming sin” so that we can become “the righteousness of God” (2 Cor 5:21). It is God stooping down to us in our depths. As David says, “Even if I make my bed in the depths of hell, you are with me” (Ps 139:8). We should therefore not be talking about “redemptive withdrawal” with Christ as our image of God, indeed with Christ crucified. The cross, understood as an expression of restorative rather than punitive justice, is a picture of redemptive union with humanity in the very depths of our sin and wretchedness. It is God entering into our abandonment like the father finding the prodigal son among the pig slop and embracing him there. At the moment Christ called out “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani!” God was in Christ on the cross, and likewise when we most feel abandoned, God is there. As Paul writes,

"I am convinced that nothing can ever separate us from God’s love. Neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither our fears for today nor our worries about tomorrow—not even the powers of hell can separate us from God’s love. No power in the sky above or in the earth below—indeed, nothing in all creation will ever be able to separate us from the love of God that is revealed in Christ Jesus our Lord." (Rom 8:38-39)

You've heard it said, “God can’t be where there is sin,” but I say in Christ crucified we see that this is exactly where God is, and where God has always been.

“Redemptive” Violence

Let’s turn to focus on the “redemptive” aspect of Redemptive Withdrawal. To illustrate this, Greg cites Lev 26:16-45. This passage consists of God repeatedly threatening escalations of violence and terror if the Israelites do not repent. Here’s a sample,

“I will bring on you sudden terror, wasting diseases and fever that will destroy your sight and sap your strength...

‘If after all this you will not listen to me, I will punish you for your sins seven times over… I will send wild animals against you, and they will rob you of your children, destroy your cattle and make you so few in number that your roads will be deserted.

If in spite of these things you do not accept my correction but continue to be hostile toward me, I will send a plague among you, and you will be given into enemy hands.

If in spite of this you still do not listen to me but continue to be hostile toward me... I myself will punish you for your sins seven times over. You will eat the flesh of your sons and the flesh of your daughters.” (Lev 26:16-27)

While he does mention certain “aspects of these judgments to reflect the pre-Christian perspective of the author,” mentioning cannibalism specifically as an example, Greg nevertheless declares, “I believe the motivation this passage ascribes to God... is a direct revelation. For what drives the escalating judgment is God’s hope to restore his people” (791).

I do not doubt that this was the ancient author’s motivation behind these threats of horrifying violence. However, we should seriously question the notion that inflicting violent physical harm and emotional trauma is “redemptive” in any way. Greg is certainly correct that these stories reflect the “pre-Christian perspective of the author” in regards to cannibalism, but he is apparently missing that it also reflects the ancient perspective of people who commonly practiced what we would today regard as criminal child abuse, seeing this violence as redemptive. As William Webb has outlined in his study of corporal punishment and the Bible, the Old Testament calls for striking a child with a whip or rod on the back or sides. Because this is where the internal organs are located, this would likely result in internal bleeding as well as welts and bruises. While leaving such marks on a child’s body would be legal grounds for charges of child abuse today, people at the time believed that inflicting such wounds was healing and redemptive. As Proverbs puts it, “Blows and wounds scrub away evil, and beatings purge the inmost being” (Prov 20:30). This reflects the common understanding of people at the time, and here this abusive understanding is being projected onto God unknowingly by this biblical author. They did not know any better. We, however, living in the 21st century, really should.

So what do we do with the violent judgments of God found throughout the Old Testament? We do what Greg proposed in volume I, we repudiate them as incongruent with Christ crucified, “Any conception that characterizes God’s power in terms of coercive control rather than self-sacrificial love must be identified as an all too common anthropomorphic projection onto God” (196). As Greg writes in his reply to me,

“My entire thesis is predicated on the insistence that the violent judgments of God cannot be justified, let alone made to look ‘loving and just’! Indeed, I argue that it is only when we abandon all attempts to justify them that we can see how these violent portraits bear witness to the cross.”

Precisely. We will not find God behind the violent judgments portrayed in the Old Testament. These reflect the image of a punitive warrior god. If we want to find Christ in these passages, we must look for the victims, the scapegoats in these texts. That is where you will find Christ crucified, deeply buried.

Conclusion

What began as a project to interpret Scripture through a cruciform lens is undermined by a punitive understanding of the cross. This is not a Girardian view of the atonement which seeks to unmask sacred violence, rather the principle of Redemptive Withdrawal makes the case for sacred violence. The principle of Redemptive Withdrawal is quite literally a perpetuation of what Walter Wink called the myth of redemptive violence.

At the root of all of this is an understanding of the cross based on punitive justice. As we have seen here, this leads to calling horrific violence just and restorative. What is needed is a non-punitive understanding of the cross resulting in a truly nonviolent cruciform hermeneutic. I have attempted to work out such a non-punitive understanding of the cross in my book Healing the Gospel.

In the end, there is simply no room for violence in the economy of God. But I do not need to appeal here to Wink or Girard to make this claim. I can look directly to the work of Greg Boyd, and in fact I can look to this very work, volume I.

“The indiscriminate love and unconditional nonviolence reflects the essence of who God is, and thus reflects the character of all God does. God can therefore no more act violently than God can lie or deny himself” (226).

“If we understand God completely in light of what happened on the cross... we can only conclude it is contrary to God’s very nature to engage in violence.” (225).

That means that we can look at God's actions and have them model how we should act.

“On the cross, Jesus fully displayed God’s self-sacrificial, enemy-embracing, nonviolent character, and the church is called and empowered to embody this same character” (205).

To understand God correctly is to understand that God looks like Jesus. If we have seen Jesus, we have seen the Father. Both are equally examples of enemy love.

“Jesus predicates his command to love indiscriminately and to refrain from all violence... on the fact that this alone reflects the character of the Father.” (224-225)

So when we see images of a god who punishes—even if this is done with “redemptive intent”—we must recognize that this is not a cruciform Jesus-shaped understanding of God, and must therefore be repudiated as the false warrior god, a god made in our own image. In the cross we see that God does not overcome evil with evil, God overcomes evil with good.

In conclusion, let me stress that the issues I have laid out here have to do with the specific punitive understanding of the cross that Greg set forth with his principle of Redemptive Withdrawal. As I have outlined here, I see severe problems with that principle and believe it should be abandoned. However, I very much agree with the idea of reading all of Scripture through a cruciform lens.

On a personal note, Greg had wondered in his response to my reviews whether I was upset with him for his criticism of my work which he laid out in chapter 8 of his book. Greg, let me assure you that I am not. On the contrary, I appreciate you pushing me to not stop at repudiation of these violent portraits, but to go further from there, digging deeper to find Christ. I hear you, and I believe your principle of Cruciform Accommodation is a viable approach to doing this, so long as it is disentangled from a punitive understanding of the cross. I hope that what I have said here can be taken constructively, and ultimately serve to strengthen Greg's wider project of reading all of Scripture with cruciform eyes.

A Theological Review of the Crucifixion of the Warrior God (part 3)

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 06 May 2017 21:30:00 +0000

Must there be skate goats?

This post is part 3 in a series reviewing Greg Boyd’s The Crucifixion of the Warrior God. In Part1 I cited lots of quotes from the book that I liked. In Part2 I respond to Greg's critique of me (which I did not like).

In this post I would like to offer a theological and ethical review of the central argument of The Crucifixion of the Warrior God, noting some problems I see and proposing possible solutions to them. I’ll begin with a broad overview of the argument in the book. The first 10 chapters of volume I set up the problem which, simply put, is that genocide and Jesus don’t mix. Boyd thus proposes reading Scripture through the lens of Christ crucified, understood in terms of self-sacrificing nonviolent enemy-love. The last two chapters of volume I present Boyd’s proposed solution, a “Cruciform Hermeneutic” which seeks to show how we can find the love of Jesus in these OT portraits of God’s violence. This is then further developed in the first two chapters of volume II (ch 13 & 14).

Boyd admits that these OT texts—as the biblical author intended them to be understood, and insofar as what the texts actually say and promote—do, in fact, present a “revolting” portrait of an enemy-hating violent “warrior” God, and are used to justify horrific violence being committed in God’s name. Examples given of this divine violence found in the OT include genocide, cannibalism, and public gang rape. Citing these disturbing examples, Boyd proposes that in the very ugliness of such passages we can see Christ’s beauty, just as we see this in the ugliness of the cross. For example, he cites the prophet Nathan’s decree of God’s punishment of king David (2 Sam 12:11), noting that this divine punishment consists of the “public raping of a multitude of unfortunate women” (718). Boyd first proposes that, in light of the cross, we know that God is in fact “outraged” by this, and further declares that this passage of Scripture reflects the “twisted and culturally conditioned heart of the biblical author” (719), which is clearly a “sub-Christlike portrait” (720). However, he continues, when read through “the lens of the cross” we can discern how this story of divine-decreed rape “bears witness to the same sin-bearing faithfulness that God displayed on the cross” (720).

The problem with this, of course, is that it does not. This is categorically not a parallel to the cross, but its polar opposite. This is something that Boyd acknowledges as he develops this in volume 2, stating that these violent OT passages present God as “a perpetrator of violence” whereas on the cross we see God as “a victim of violence on Calvary” (642). So despite his earlier claim in volume I that “we discern him in these literary crucifixes in the exact same way we discern him in the historical crucifixion” (511, emphasis added), he acknowledges here in volume II that these are in fact not parallels, but, rather obviously, complete opposites.

Behind all this appears to be a fundamental misunderstanding of how the cross functions as an expression of non-violent enemy-love. Properly understood, the cross is about seeing God in Jesus as the innocent victim of violence. In contrast, these OT depictions present God as the alleged perpetrator of violence. While both are indeed ugly, they are absolutely and in no way parallel. For instance, the above example of God’s punishment of David’s sin is clearly not a story of God “bearing sin” at all, but of God allegedly decreeing the sin of rape, portrayed as just punishment. Simply put: Seeing God in Jesus as the victim of religious and political violence, and seeing God in the Old Testament as the perpetrator of that violence are not parallels, they are polar opposites.

As the Gospels stress, Jesus on the cross is falsely accused of sin, not by God but by the religious and political powers. Through the cross, as Paul says, those powers are thus exposed as unjust, including unveiling their violence as unjust. This represents a Girardian reading of the cross, and in this same section of his book Boyd continues on to favorably reference Girard, affirming this understanding of the atonement (696-697). He quotes Walter Wink who states,

“The violence of Scripture, so embarrassing to us today, became the means by which the sacred violence was revealed for what it is: a lie perpetrated against victims in the name of a God who, through violence, was working to expose violence for what it is and to reveal the divine nature as nonviolent.” (697)

Read out of context one can see how the above quote does sound a lot like what Boyd is proposing. However, Wink is not claiming, as Boyd is, that these violent OT depictions of God as the perpetrator of gang rape, cannibalism, and genocide are in themselves “a testament to God’s covenantal faithfulness and his self-sacrificial, sin-bearing nature” (689) either on the “surface” or with a “deeper” reading. In contrast to Boyd’s going “deeper,” Wink (following Raymund Schwager and Girard) instead proposes a reading that I will describe as looking wider, understanding these violent passages in the larger context of the whole story of the Bible which culminates in Jesus. I therefore wish to propose that we can find a way in Wink, Schwager, and Girard’s looking wider to see how even these dark passages can, when read through the lens of Christ, play a vital and revelatory part in the wider context of the entire canon of Scripture, leading us to Christ. Allow me to unpack this a bit...

Throughout the multivocal Old Testament we encounter many conflicting and contradictory voices, each claiming to speak for God. Many, as we have seen, claim that God commands horrific violence. However we also find minority voices within that same Hebrew canon which give voice to the victim of violence. As Wink says, the OT can be thus understood as “a long and laborious exodus out of the world of violence and sacred projections, an exodus plagued with many reversals and falling short of its goal” (Engaging the Powers, 146). As Girard asserts, it is not until Jesus that the scapegoating mechanism is fully revealed and exposed. We can thus look back from Jesus and see these violent passages, which project human violence onto God, serving now with opened eyes to mirror our own proclivity to make violence sacred. These disturbing passages therefore stand as a record of how religious people like you and me can use God to justify our hate and violence.

If we look only at a particular passage of Scripture in isolation, portraying God as violent, it is simply not true that it shows us Christ’s self-sacrificial love. If you dig deep here it becomes no less ugly. In such passages we see our sin mirrored, and specifically we see the sin of religiously justified violence mirrored before us. This is revelatory when read in this way in the light of Christ, and I stress that it is not what the original authors intended. We can thus, as Boyd proposes, see here a divine revelatory intent in that, when we read these passages in light of Christ, we can now see them exposed as sinful projections. The original authors of course, themselves, under the grip of the lie of redemptive violence, intended these judgments to be seen as good and right. Through the perspective of the cross we now can see that they instead reflect the sin of religiously justified violence.

These violent passages mark the point on that exodus story when we are still in bondage to the lie that violence will save us. It is the point in the story when we are still blind like Saul. However, when we learn to read wide by beginning with the perspective of Jesus opening our eyes to the lie of redemptive violence, we can then look back and discern all of Scripture chronicling humanity’s messy and often failing struggle to break free of this lie. That of course is not to say that we are today somehow beyond it, nor to say that we as Christians are immune. On the contrary, seeing violence as “good” and “just” still grips us as a society today, particularly in America. Indeed, one could say that more than 80% of white evangelicals are deeply under this spell today. God revealed in Christ crucified, understood from a Girardian frame, unmasks that lie. Our eyes are opened to seeing that the way of Jesus is the way of God and the way of violence and power are not. To truly see this is amazing, revelatory. With opened eyes, these dark passages serve as a permanent reminder documenting the sinfulness and profound hurt that comes through religion, lest we ever think we are immune.

Whether or not Greg will find this approach compelling I cannot say. But while I find significant problems with his particular solution, as I have outlined here, I do see something worth salvaging in his larger project of developing a cruciform hermeneutic, and hope that others may find the solution of looking wider, found in the Girardian perspective of Wink and others, to be a viable means to do this. In other words, my intent is to provide a means to overcome the shortcomings of Boyd’s good proposal, in the hopes of furthering it. I believe that when we learn to look wide through the eyes of Jesus we can indeed see how even the most disturbing parts of Scripture can have a revelatory content that ultimately points us to Christ, just as seeing our own sin exposed drives us to the cross.

I wish I could stop here, but I cannot, because Boyd does not. Volume II continues for another 11 chapters (ch 15-25) presenting an apologetic for God’s violent judgments in the OT as loving and just, seemingly taking a u-turn from the nonviolent course Boyd had been establishing up to this point in the book. You can read that part here.

UPDATE: Greg has responded to this post on his blog. The main substance of his reply focuses on our differing understandings of how the cross functions. Greg seems a bit perplexed and that is probably my fault as I do not really unpack this in the above post here. In the next installment of this series, part4, I deal with this extensively, and hopefully this will serve to clear things up, explaining the difficulties I see in regards to Greg's understanding of the cross, and how this impacts how he then reads violent OT passages with that lens. Since the foundation of Greg's entire hermenutical approach is rooted in the cross, we definitively need to get that understanding right.

Since Greg's reply to me I've been thinking about the principle of Cruciform Accommodation and how these OT texts might be read through the same Girardian frame that the Gospel writers used to understand the crucifixion.

I still don't think it makes sense to draw a parallel between Jesus (as the victim of violence) and Yahweh (being the perpetrator of violence), even if we agree that both are falsely accused. The parallel would be between Yahweh in the OT who is falsely seen as behind the violence, and God the Father in the NT who is also falsely seen as behind the crucifixion (which is how Rome and advocates of PSA would see it). In other words, I think that Greg is right in saying that we can legitimately see Yahweh in the OT as being falsely accused of being the perpetrator, but I don't think this is where we find Christ in the story, at least not if we are reading with a Girardian frame...

Basically we look at who in the story plays the role of the righteous authority, and in the Girardian reading that authority is unmasked as being illegitimate. In the NT the authority that executed Jesus is delegitimized (i.e. the cross was not just) and in the OT the slaughter of the Canaanites was also delegitimized as an unjust judgment. In both we can say that the God figure behind all this is falsely portrayed, and is instead of being with the perpetrators is with the victims of that violence done in the name of justice.

That's where God in heaven is in these stories. However, if we want to find Christ, I'd say we need to ask who the scapegoat is in the story. Who is the victim of violence who is being described as bad and deserving of death? In this story it is obviously the Canaanites who are being scapegoated. Just as we find God in Christ on the cross, so too we find God among all those who are scapegoated.

The Crucifixion of the Warrior God, A Second Look

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 29 Apr 2017 21:35:00 +0000

The Dismissal Solution club (I'm the second from the left)

As some of you know, I’ve been digging into Greg Boyd’s new book, Crucifixion of the Warrior God As some of you have pointed out to me, he liberally cites my work in Disarming Scripture. So naturally, I hold a particular interest in Boyd’s most recent thoughts on the subject, both because the topic is very close to my heart, but also because I’m frequently referenced in the book.

I am currently about half-way through the first volume. The first part if the book really impressed me, because Greg boldly confronts the problematic frequent OT depictions of a "violent warrior god," insisting we must "abandon all attempts to defend" these depictions, and instead "permanently crucify" this understanding of God, replacing it with an understanding of God revealed in Christ crucified. You can read my review of that part of the book here.

But then I got to chapter 8, in which Greg addresses the works of Eric Seibert (Disturbing Divine Behavior), Peter Enns (The Bible Tells Me So), myself (Disarming Scripture), and others, grouping us all into what he calls the “dismissal solution” (more on that unflattering term later). Greg defines this “dismissal solution” as seeking to “discredit” the OT based on “historical, ethical, theological, and logical grounds” (341). He then identifies Seibert and Enns as falling into the above “historical” category, and further names me and others as belonging to his “dismissal solution” as well, saying,

“Something similar could be argued about the work of C.S. Cowles, Derek Flood, and Dora Mbuwayesango, who reject violent depictions of God primarily on theological grounds, as well as about the work of Wes Morriston, Randal Rauser, and Paul Anderson, who advocate similar solutions, primarily on ethical grounds.” pp. 342-343

Note above that Greg identifies my rejection of violent depictions of God on theological grounds, rather than historical grounds. I’ll return to that shortly, but first let me address the historical grounds that he identifies with Seibert and Enns. Greg does not actually disagree with the archeological evidence these claims are based on (extensive archeological findings in the later part of the 20th century have convinced the vast majority of scholars today that the genocide accounts recorded in the book of Joshua are largely fictional), but argues basically that the moral message of the text is not changed simply because the historical veracity of the account is disproven. I agree. The moral message remains horrible in these texts describing merciless genocide in God’s name. The portrait of God here remains awful.

What is significant is that if the genocide accounts are a fiction, this makes it rather clear that the claim that God commanded them is equally a fiction. This matters because many biblical accounts use the evidence of miracles to back up their position. So we ask, if genocide is wrong, then why did God cause the walls of Jericho to fall down as the Israelites marched around them allowing them to then slaughter every living thing inside in the name of the Lord (Joshua 6)? When we learn from high-precision radiocarbon dating that Jericho was destroyed more than a century before Joshua ever got there, that kind of changes things. God, in fact, didn’t say this and didn’t do that because the entire thing simply never happened.

Again, this does not solve the problem of these violent depictions of God entirely. It does not change the fact that the violent ideology behind them is clearly deplorable. Nor does it change the indisputable reality that this very ideology has been used to justify very real historical genocide and bloodshed in the name of God ever since— genocide perpetrated by the Christian church no less. Greg however claims that Seibert and Enns believe the problem is solved with this historical evidence, and thus with this archeological evidence proceed to “dismiss” these violent depictions of God, and includes me in there too,

“[I am not] suggesting that these scholars altogether dismiss violent divine portraits, as if they found nothing of value in them. To the contrary, Seibert, Enns, Flood, and others have worked hard to pull positive lessons out of them. Yet, each author ultimately assumes that the problem posed by the biblical authors ascribing violence to God is to be solved by denying that the violence ever took place.” p. 343, emphasis added

I’m not sure what Pete would say about this charge (I’m hoping he blogs about it soon), but I am fairly certain he is misreading Eric’s position, and I certainly can say that he is misreading mine. As I read it, Eric Seibert’s larger goal is to develop a Christocentric hermeneutic, which is incidentally what Greg has been working to do as well thus far in his book. This is also my goal in Disarming Scripture. Namely, I reject committing violence in God’s name (which is not quite the same as rejecting “violent depictions of God” since it focuses on our moral actions, rather than on our theoretical understanding, meaning my core focus is practical, focusing on how we live) by adopting the way Jesus and Paul read Scripture, who both also rejected justifying violence in God’s name.

I would propose that Greg actually agrees, or at least he has in everything he has said previous to this chapter. For example, Greg refers to these “violent depictions of God” as “sub-Christ-like” (118), “sub-Christian” (376), “anthropomorphic projection onto God” which religiously is “essentially pagan” (196), reflecting the “limitations and sin” of the “biblical authors depictions of God” (376). He describes them as “horrific” (291), and states, “However revolted we are by violent divine portraits, must we not conclude that God must be unimaginably more so?” He further declares these texts “fallen” (332), and “evil” (288), and states that we should not follow them or allow them to shape who we understand God to truly be,

“If anything in the law or prophets fails to agree with Jesus, however, the implication is that it is Jesus who should be followed. Nothing in the law and prophets should be allowed to compromise what Jesus reveals about God’s character and will.” pp. 51-52

Greg avoids using the word “reject” although this is for all intents and purposes practically what he is doing. Along these lines he states that “We certainly ought to reject their violence” but that we “must do this in order to look past the surface meaning” (451). In other words, as far as what these texts actually say, as far as what the biblical authors intended them to say, Greg agrees we should reject them. He however wants us to continue to look deeper to find a hidden message beyond this. An evaluation of whether he successfully can show this hidden message will need to wait since Greg has not said anything about this yet in the book.

In his summary at the end of the chapter Greg writes, “I do not believe the Dismissal Solution is a viable option, at least not for those who feel compelled by our faith in Christ as Lord to embrace his high view of Scripture” (378). Since a central focus of my book was based on identifying how Jesus read Scripture, particularly in regards to religiously justifying violence, I must object to the overly-general and anachronistic assertion that Jesus holds to a “high view of Scripture” (a modern category), which frankly contradicts what Greg himself has written previously in his book where he agrees with me on how Jesus actually reads Scripture,

“One of the clearest expressions of the superior authority of Jesus is that while he certainly shared his Jewish contemporaries’ view that all Scripture is ‘God-breathed,’ he was nevertheless not afraid of repudiating it when he felt led by his Father to do so (Jn 8:28, 12:49-50, 14:31). While conservative exegetes have made valiant attempts to avoid this conclusion, it is hard to deny that Jesus taught things that “blatantly contradicts and overturn multiple Old Testament passages and principles,” as Derek Flood notes.” p. 67

In discussing Jesus “revoking the lex talonis” (an eye for an eye) he writes,

“Jesus was calling on people to respond to wrongdoers in a way that is ‘the direct opposite’ of the OT, as Flood notes. It is understandable that so many have attempted to soften this contrast, for, among other things, it conflicts with many people’s understanding of biblical inspiration to grant that Jesus explicitly repudiated commands of the OT. But these attempts simply have not been compelling.” p. 72

So Jesus “repudiates” Scripture. Repudiate is a synonym for reject. So Greg could have just as easily written that I “repudiate violent depictions of God primarily on theological grounds” and added by the way that Jesus does, too. This may “conflict with many people’s understanding of biblical inspiration” but that is nevertheless precisely how Jesus reads Scripture. Greg goes so far as to state that “This means to be considered a child of the Father in heaven by Jesus, one had to be willing to break the OT commands to retaliate” (73).

That’s why reading this chapter is so baffling. It feels like the Greg who wrote this chapter has not met the Greg who wrote the first part of the book before it. I also find it hard to overlook the pejorative way that Greg frames the entire chapter, beginning with how he introduces his “dismissal solution” at the outset of the chapter, claiming it finds its origins in the heretic Marcion,

“The first proposal, to be addressed in this chapter, was put forth by a second-century preacher named Marcion. He was uniformly branded as a heretic by the proto-orthodox theologians of the time because he solved the problem posed by the OT’s depictions of God by simply dismissing them, along with the entire OT, as an authority for Christians. I will thus label this response “the Dismissal Solution.” p. 336

However, Greg’s central claim is that his so-called “Dismissal Solution” “...assumes that the problem posed by biblical authors ascribing violence to God is to be solved by denying that this violence ever took place” (343), which Greg admits Marcion never actually said, “Contrary to a common misunderstanding of his position, Marcion did not reject the OT on the grounds that it was historically inaccurate or in any other respect untrue” (337).

Why not instead claim that this perspective finds its origins in Anabaptism, since as Greg notes, they did actually make this claim (127). Since Greg is sympathetic to Anabaptism this would then be both more accurate as well as more generous. Let’s be honest, associating those of us who he groups in the “dismissal solution” with someone who was “uniformly branded as a heretic” really can only serve as a form of guilt by association. I would have hoped for Greg to show a little more care in his words. To be clear, I am frankly not terribly worried about being accused of being a heretic. Looking at church history I observe that the heretics were usually the good guys. However, it is meant to discredit, and I’m sure that since Greg has surely been accused of being a heretic plenty of times and is surely not happy about that, I would appeal to Jesus’ motto of “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” here.

Along these same lines, the term “dismissal” is clearly not one that any of us would chose to describe our position since it not-so-subtly implies that we are not really dealing with the issue or taking it seriously. In case you might think this was accidental, I note that Greg writes,

“I am compelled to take the genocidal portrait of God in this narrative just as seriously as I do any other canonical divine portrait. And this is the primary difference between my approach to violent divine portraits and the Dismissal Solution.” p. 370

It strikes me as rather self-evident that if a person writes an entire book on a subject, they can hardly be accused of not taking it seriously or of simply “dismissing” it. So how about we call it the “Repudiation Solution” instead, and you can call mine the “Repudiate Like Jesus Does Solution” or if you prefer, “Cruciform Repudiation” which does sound a lot catchier.

Greg is certainly welcome to disagree with me and others (as I’m sure he disagrees with those Anabaptists). I also welcome his attempt to build further upon the work we have done, taking it to places beyond where we were able to go. However, I wish he would then frame it in that way. Indeed, the only way one would be able to somehow look beyond what the texts say to find this “deeper” meaning, as Greg aims to do, is by first identifying that the “surface” meaning is in conflict with the God revealed in Jesus. In that sense, the work that I and others have done can be seen as building the foundation for what Greg aims to do. So why not suggest that he sees the need to build further, rather than seeking to repudiate and discredit what we have said? Why the stress on framing Seibert, Enns, myself, and others as rivals to him? It seems so unnecessary, and indeed unfortunate.

Again, as I mentioned earlier, Greg has not yet made his case for how to find this “deeper” meaning hidden in the text. So I will keep reading.

Continue to Part 3. Go back to Part 1.

UPDATE: Greg has responded to this review on his blog, and also on his podcast (the part with me begins at a little after 3 minutes in). Although I'm pretty sure it was recorded earlier, I actually found what Greg said on the podcast more helpful than the blog. He reflected that perhaps he had been too "harsh" or "pejorative" saying "It's always good to question yourself, and maybe I overplayed that." He also clarified that while he agrees that we must reject violent OT passages as being incongruent with the cruciform God, he sees this as a stepping stone which should lead us to wrestle with the text as part of our sacred Scripture seeking to understand how even this can point us to Christ. I appreciate him being reflective and gracious and agree that we should always question ourselves (I hope I can exhibit that too!), and I also appreciate him challenging all of us (myself included!) to continue to dig and wrestle with these difficult texts.

The Crucifixion of the Warrior God, A First Look

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 24 Apr 2017 04:01:00 +0000

I’m reading through Greg Boyd’s new 2-volume work Crucifixion of the Warrior God: Interpreting the Old Testament’s Violent Portraits of God in Light of the Cross. I naturally don’t want to make any final assessments until I have read it all the way through, but I thought it may be of interest to share what Boyd is saying as I go. So I will largely simply be citing passages from the book, selecting the quotes that stand out to me, and mostly just letting these citations speak for themselves, perhaps adding a bit of context where necessary, and re-ordering them a bit as needed for the sake of clarity here. This is thus not a review nor is it a summary. Rather, it's stuff I personally found provocative and worth sharing in the hopes of sparking conversation.

In this first post I'll cover the introduction through chapter two. We begin with the introduction to volume 1 where Greg outlines the basic argument of his book. Greg first recounts how he came to write the book, a journey that led him to part ways with his fellow Evangelicals in regards to the interpretation of violent portraits of God in the OT.

“I can no longer agree with many of my fellow Evangelicals who insist that we must simply embrace these violent divine portraits as completely accurate revelations of God alongside the revelation we are given in Christ.” p xxix

“I was also supposed to accept every other portrait of God in Scripture as revelatory as well, including the violent portrait. Hence, like most Christians, I had a mental picture of a God who was Christ-like to a degree but who was also capable of commanding merciless genocide and bringing about familial cannibalism.” p xxxi

Greg consequently developed what he terms a “Cruciform Hermeneutic” which could be described as the thesis statement of his book,

“The driving conviction of the Cruciform Hermeneutic is that since Calvary gives us a perspective of God’s character that it is superior to what people in the OT had, we can also enjoy a superior perspective of what was actually going on when OT authors depicted God engaging in and commanding violence.” p xxxiv

It’s important to note that this does not mean that Greg intends to use this hermeneutic to explain and justify these violent passages. Greg explains that he felt compelled to break with “most Evangelical books addressing this topic” which, as Greg puts it somewhat in tongue-in-cheek fashion, attempt to “put the best possible ‘spin’ on violent portraits of God in the OT” (p xxix). Rather, this hermeneutic aims to completely change how we understand depictions of a violent warrior god found in the OT.

“Scripture’s violent divine portraits become mini-literary crucifixions that function as harbingers of the historical crucifixion. … For when the sin of the world was nailed to the cross with Christ (Col 2:14), the sinful conception of God as a violent warrior god was included. Hence, the revelation of the agape-loving and sin-bearing crucified God entails the permanent crucifixion of the violent warrior god.” p xli-xlii

So what does the "crucifixion of the warrior god" mean practically? As Greg explains in chapter one,

“I am convinced that it is only when our conviction about the supremacy of the revelation of God on Calvary causes us to abandon all attempts to defend the violent behavior ascribed to God in the OT that we can begin to see how these violent portraits actually bear witness to God’s true, cruciform character.” p 36

To put that in perspective, Greg’s goal in writing the book is to show how it is possible to affirm the inspiration of all of Scripture (or as he prefers to say, the “God-breathed” nature of Scripture), including these violent portraits, while at the same time recognizing that they are, at face value, at odds with and opposed to the revelation of God in Christ. Therefore

“We must trust God’s character as it has been revealed in the crucified Christ, to the point that we have no choice but to call into question all portraits of God that conflict with it, even as we continue to faithfully affirm that these portraits are ‘God-breathed.’” p 34

In other words, Greg stresses that if we wish to get to the point of being able to understand how these passages are God-breathed and point to Christ, the place where we must start is in fully recognizing the degree to which these passages are in conflict with the revelation of God we see in Christ.

Key to doing this, Greg argues, is to learn to read Scripture in a way that places absolute normative and interpretive priority on God revealed in Christ. In other words, Greg maintains that in order to read all of Scripture rightly, we must begin with Jesus and the God that he reveals.

“ ‘God is Christlike, and in him is no un-Christlikeness at all.’ … He is not part of what the Father has to say or even the main thing the Father has to say: as the one and only Word of God (John 1:1), Jesus is the total content of the Father’s revelation to us.” p 40

This revelation of God in Christ should then shape how we read all of Scripture, and in particular in regards to violent portraits of God in the OT, Greg insists that it is Christ who needs to shape our understanding of these passages, rather than these passages that shape our understanding of Christ,

“The centerpiece of the message of the NT is that we worship a God who defeats evil by dying out of love for enemies rather than by killing enemies, and he calls on his people to do the same. … This revelation should never have been qualified by, let alone trumped by, the OT depictions of a ‘god who fights.’” p 24

Greg therefore flatly rejects a common assumptions within Evangelicalism, which is that all of Scripture is equally authoritative. Asserting instead that,

“If anything in the law or prophets fails to agree with Jesus, however, the implication is that it is Jesus who should be followed. Nothing in the law and prophets should be allowed to compromise what Jesus reveals about God’s character and will.” p 51-52

He further comes against a very common practice within Evangelicalism of trying to let the rest of the Bible temper and modulate Jesus.

“How misguided it is for followers of Jesus to allow any portrait of God or any teaching of the OT to in any way qualify or compromise the portrait of God and the teaching we are given by Jesus.” p 73

“The NT presents Jesus as the definitive revelation of God...no sub-Christ-like portrait of God in the OT should ever be allowed to qualify it.” p 36

So in sum, Greg describes the frequent OT depictions of a "violent warrior god" as "sinful" and "sub-Christ-like," insisting we must "abandon all attempts to defend" these depictions, and instead "permanently crucify" this understanding of God, replacing it with an understanding of God revealed in Christ crucified. Taken all together, those are some pretty bold statements. Personally, I like bold. The world has plenty of dry boring books on theology. Heaven knows I've read a lot of them. This book is certainly not that.

I'll keep reading, and hopefully have further posts to share in the future as I work my way through the book. But I think there is certainly plenty to chew on here, even in these first two chapters. But at this point let me turn it to you: Are these ideas familiar or brand new to you? Do you find his statements affirming and reassuring? Or do you find them threatening and frightening? What are your thoughts?

UPDATE: Continue to Part 2

The Shack and a God of Color

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 06 Apr 2017 01:53:00 +0000

When God was portrayed in William P. Young’s bestselling novel The Shack as a black woman it got some white conservatives upset. The same thing happened again last month when the film adaptation was released starring Octavia Spencer (The Help, Hidden Figures) as God, or “Papa” as she is referred to in the Shack. Apparently when God is portrayed as a lion, that’s totally fine, but when God is portrayed as a black woman this gets some people quite offended. Color me unsurprised.

I haven’t seen the movie yet, and I’m a little bit afraid that it will be a bit too sappy and on the nose for my own personal taste. But I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the idea of depicting God as a black woman, and I’m convinced there is something quite profound there, if we are willing to look past the “offense of the cross” to see it.

Of course historically, Jesus was unquestionably a person of color, despite the many depictions of him as a blond-haired blue-eyed white man. But there is something much deeper going on than skin color. Jesus explicitly chose to associate with those who were at the bottom of society, those who were considered the “least of these.” To proclaim Jesus as Lord is to say that the Caesar is not. It means the dethroning of the god of empire, dominance, force, wealth. As Jürgen Moltmann put it,

“For Christ's sake I am an atheist, an atheist in respect to the gods of the world and world history, the Caesars and the political demigods who follow them. Only a Christian can be a good atheist.” (The Crucified God, p. 195)

I own a great debt to what I have learned from white male theologians like Moltmann. But I feel compelled to go in a more radical direction. When I look at how white evangelicals in America have abandoned Jesus to follow empire, mammon, hatred, and state violence, I feel tempted to become an atheist, and I certainly do declare with Moltmann my categorical rejection of their false gospel. While in the past I could think that these “hyper-Calvinists” where perhaps a loud and angry minority, I cannot ignore that 80% of evangelicals voted for Trump.

For decades I have, like many others, attempted to walk a middle ground, stressing that liberals and conservatives both have valid perspectives, and also both have some big blind spots. However, there has been a major shift within conservative Republicanism over the last several years culminating in the most recent political election. This shift is characterized by a movement away from compassion towards an outright fostering of hatred and fear, seeing those from other races, other countries, other religions as the “enemy.” Really it is a move away from democracy towards something more akin to dictatorship. In light of this, I simply cannot in good conscience maintain a position of being “in the radical middle” politically and socially. I feel that I have a moral obligation to categorically name that movement as representing the polar opposite of Christ and his kingdom values, and openly opposing it in Jesus' name. I refuse to normalize this by acting as if voting for Trump was a legitimate choice for followers of Jesus to make. This is not politics as usual where there is room to be neutral. There is no place to watch from the sidelines, as if I were morally above it all. If I care for the least, as Jesus does, I must stand with them. With the incarnation Jesus shows that holiness does not remain separate, detached and above it all, rather purity requires getting dirty.

Because of this decline of conservative politics into moral bankruptcy, and the evangelical church's blindly following them into this seemingly bottomless pit, I find myself often exclaiming in disbelief, “What is wrong with the church?!” But as I ask this, I have to stop and wonder why it is that I assume that this is the church? As you may be aware, when national statistics refer to “evangelicals,” they exclusively mean white evangelicals. Black evangelicals are not counted. So when I exclaim, “What’s wrong with the church?” or “Why does the church not care about social justice?” there are plenty of people of color who could answer back “Excuse me? What church are you talking about?”

To put things in the starkest of terms, it’s clear that when slave owners worshiped God in their Christian churches, they saw a very different God, a very different Jesus, than their slaves did when they worshiped God in their churches. For those slaves, Jesus was the one who had come to set the captives free. Knowing what I do about the historical Jesus as well as the Jesus of the New Testament, I can say unequivocally that the slaves were much more in line with the real Jesus.

We don’t have institutional slavery anymore in America, and I used to think that racism was a thing of the past, too. Something that we fixed back in the 1960s. Or at least it was something you could only still find in the deep south. I was so very wrong. Michelle Alexander opened my eyes to see the extent of how profoundly broken our criminal justice system is, as well as how wide-spread systemic racism is within our nation’s police force. I’ve learned that nearly all black parents need to talk to their children about how not to get killed by police. As a parent myself that really hit me hard.

While I have just woken up to this disturbing reality, it’s something African Americans have been living with for... well, for my entire life. I see the angry white atheists, and believe me, I understand their righteous anger. But I don’t want to be like that. I don’t want to convert to atheism, even in a Moltmannian “Christian atheist” way. I’m convinced that’s a very “white guy” thing to do. I want to do something more radical, and I hope more life-giving. I want to convert and become a black Christian. In fact, I’d like to become a black female Christian. Can I do that? Well, I’m just going to.

Of course I can’t change my skin color (I can’t even get a tan). But I do want to sit at the feet of people of color, and especially of women, and learn from their faith. I’ve done that already in an intellectual way over the years, having read lots of feminist and black liberation theology, and have found this to be tremendously rewarding to learn from this “theology from the margins.” But I want to take that to a deeper place. I feel honestly like my own faith depends on it.

My faith in the “church” I have known as a white evangelical has been shattered. I no longer believe in that religion. But I see hope in another church. I want to learn how they can hold on to hope in the face of so much injustice. I want to learn to see through their eyes, to learn how to channel this anger and hurt and fear into action for good in the face of an empire that calls itself “Christian” when it is clearly not. I want to worship and trust in the God they have seen all along.

I am not talking about theology here, about something I can do in my head and in isolation. I am talking about church, about community, about learning from the lived example of others who have been walking for a long time in the place where I have only begun to walk.

Beau Willimon on Trump & Bannon's Path to War

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 19 Mar 2017 03:14:00 +0000

The following is from a Twitter thread by @BeauWillimon, the creator of the show House of Cards. I thought it was worth sharing,

"Fifteen years after 9/11, the election of Donald Trump is precisely the sort of White House that Bin Laden would have hoped for. I was living in New York when 9/11 occurred. I vividly remember a city that came together in the wake of a horrific tragedy. And all of us in New York were grateful for and inspired by the overwhelming support we received from the rest of the country. We were a nation in grief, united in our resolve to heal and remain strong despite the senseless death of thousands. The rest of the world joined our grief. Including the vast majority those in Muslim nations. They too prayed for healing and recovery. But it didn't take long before fear-mongerers seized the opportunity to advocate war for the sake of extreme ideology & profiteering.

In 2003 the Iraq War began, justified by manufactured intelligence. No WMDS were found. Hundreds of thousands of lives were lost. Meanwhile Halliburton and other similar companies made millions. And warhawks in Washington used the war to advance their agendas. Public opinion turned on the war. By 2004 most of the Dem candidates wanted it to end. Even some in the GOP were expressing doubts. Bush won re-election, but by the end of his second terms a majority of the nation wanted the war to end. Obama promised it would. Obama's withdrawal didn't happen as fast as many would have liked. And blowback from the Iraq War has caused major instability. The Middle East was swirling with chaos in response to a power void. New groups like ISIS began to emerge. The Arab Spring offered some hope for progress, but it also opened up the door for further instability.

Despite all this, the Obama administration did aim for a sustainable, more stable future in the Middle East. We can debate the effectiveness of Obama's policy. It certainly deserves criticism. But its aim was a balance between peace & security. Trump and Bannon, however - have no such aim. Their goal has been to build upon fear in order to justify their extreme agenda. They will say "peace" and "security", but they are deliberately stoking increased animosity between the U.S. and the Muslim world. Bannon has publicly said that he foresees a great holy war between Christians and Muslims.

Sound familiar? That is exactly what Bin Laden hoped to accomplish with terrorist tactics. A Holy War. Bannon's rhetoric is not any different. Increased defense spending & militarization is proof that he doesn't intend to stop at rhetoric. Discrediting the press and Intelligence Community is in preparation to propagandize the justification of armed conflict. War is Trump & Bannon's pathway for Bannon's desire to "dismantle the administrative state." And all of this plays directly on Putin's hands, who wants nothing more than to see massive destabilization of the West. Putin's alliance with the Assad regime and aggression in Syria is an attempt to foment this destabilization. nd Russian interference with elections in the U.S. and Europe is intended to exacerbate it.

Trump and Bannon welcome this interference. They have no interest in peace and security, only unfettered power. By any means necessary. They have little regard for democracy, human rights or freedoms which comprise the core values of our country. Their policies will not make us safer. They will create a more dangerous world. They will lead to war. And war is the fuel of dictators.

This dismantling of our government, erosion of values, dissolution of democracy - these were Bin Laden's aims. Which Putin will exploit. But we can #resist this future. We don't have to let Bin Laden and Putin claim victory through Trump and Bannon. We can be the nation that came together after 9/11. Who welcomed the support of our friends abroad and valued their humanity. We can lead by example again rather than following the script of terrorists & dictators. But only if WE the people lead. #Resist"

A Thousand Starfish

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 12 Feb 2017 01:23:00 +0000

Watching the news of Trump has been overwhelming, alarming, and frankly exhausting. One of the biggest stories has been of Trump’s Muslim ban. People who had legitimate visas and green cards were held in detention or deported. Families were separated, people were refused their rights to see lawyers, despite direct court orders. It was a nightmare.

That’s why I was so surprised by the perspective of a young student from Iran I know (I’ll call her Zahra). When I told Zahra I was glad to see her here, she replied with a huge grin, “Thank you, and thank you to America!”

I realized that for Zahra, America is not defined by what Trump or the White House does. It’s not CBP or ICE. She sees America in all the people who protested in airports across the country. She sees the thousands and thousands of people who took a stand for her and others like her. That’s the America Zahra sees.

It’s so easy for me to let the deluge of news stories define what America is. It’s easy to feel like my single voice is powerless. That’s why I want to remember Zahra’s perspective. I need it to sustain me through what will likely be a long resistance.

I’m reminded of the story of a beach covered with dying starfish. A man sees a boy, throwing the starfish back into the water one at a time, and says to him cynically, “There are thousands and thousands of starfish. What does it matter?” The boy throws another starfish into the water, and answers, “It mattered to him.”

It mattered to Zahra.

.

Evangelicalism’s Two-Faced God

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 05 Feb 2017 20:33:00 +0000

I recently went to a talk with Science Mike (Mike McHargue) where he discussed his memoir Finding God in the Waves, which I’m looking forward to reading (more on that soon). It was a great talk, and I was struck by something Mike said about neurology. He described how neuroscientists have observed that people who contemplate a loving God see changes in their brains, building their prefrontal cortex (the part of your brain responsible for things like compassion and moral reflection) and lessening the influence of their amygdala (the part of your brain responsible for impulsive fear-based reactions, which are helpful when you have your hand on a hot stove or step on a snake, but not so great when you are trying to resolve conflict in a relationship).

I related to what he said, and can certainly attest to experiencing this in my own life. I talk about this a lot in fact, in terms of moral development and the brain. In one sense, it’s just common sense that people who focus on feeling loved (religious or not) would tend to become more loving people. However, I found myself wondering how it could be that evangelicals (well, I should clarify, American white evangelicals) can be so focused on experiencing the love of Jesus, and at the same time can overwhelmingly support war, torture, the death penalty, corporal punishment of children, and so on. How can they so enthusiastically support policies that completely lack compassion and care of the least?

So I asked Mike, if it is true that focusing on Jesus’ love makes your brain develop the prefrontal cortex, then why is it that white American evangelicals seem to be so amygdala-driven, that is, driven by fear leading to hurtful reactive responses, as characterized by their overwhelming support for the policies of our current President?

It’s something I am genuinely baffled by. Mike stressed that some conservatives are indeed compassionate which I do not doubt, and that liberals can equally lack compassion, which is certainly true. We all can be jerks, we all can let fear lead us to being hurtful, there is no ideological monopoly on immaturity. However, there does seem to be something about white American evangelicalism that seems especially toxic. There seems to be something about white American evangelicalism in particular that makes it ripe for being unreflected, angry, fear-driven, scapegoating, and an enthusiastic supporter of violence and punishment in the name of the good. What is it?

What I took away from Mike’s response was that he suggested that the problem was their belief in a very different god from the God revealed in Jesus – a god characterized by fear and anger, who threatens eternal punishment, and is characterized by wrath. I was reminded of what Brian Zahnd has described as the “monster god” of neo-Calvinism. In short, Mike proposed that the basic problem is that they have not experienced the love of Jesus, and instead know a god of fear and anger.

It’s important to understand that Mike’s story is one that is deeply shaped by his experience of God’s love in the midst of the pain and rejection he experienced in his youth, as well as his experience of that same life-transforming love as an adult atheist. It's really a classic born-again testimony. I have myself been deeply influenced by that same experience of the love of Jesus in my life as a teen. I was born again, but this was not simply a one time event. I was drawn to knowing God's love relationally, and in that "pursuit of God" (to borrow a phrase from A.W. Tozer) I experienced over and over again a love that completely transformed my life. I write about this in my first book Intimacy with God which I chose to make free because I wanted to share this love with everyone. I realize that for many the idea of a “personal relationship with God” may seem sappy or sentimental, but I cannot stress how profoundly experiencing that love first-hand in my life as changed me. For me it is not sappy at all. From hearing Mike speak of his life, I think the same could be said for him. Mike told stories with tears in his eyes of how experiencing the love of Jesus literally "saved" him from committing suicide in his youth. It was a beautiful testimony.

From that perspective, it makes sense to think “There is just no way a person could experience love like that and be so angry and hurtful. They must experience God as angry and hurtful.” So when Mike said essentially this, my first reaction was to agree. Then the more “science-y” part of me began to kick in. The fact is, people are very capable of compartmentalizing and showing great inconsistency in different parts of their lives. I’m sure there were many people in the 1800’s who were moved to tears at a revival meeting, and then came home and mercilessly beat their slaves – I can even see them thinking that doing so was good. I’m also pretty sure that many of the people who adamantly support things like war and torture today actually do experience the love of Jesus in their lives. It seems really counterintuitive, but we humans are complex creatures. I strongly suspect that if we were to survey white American evangelicals who support these angry and hurtful policies, we would find that a great many could tell moving stories of how they have experienced the love of Jesus in their lives.

Let me stress here that I don’t mean at all to be critical of Mike’s answer. He said it off the top of his head, and I think it was a great answer with a really important insight. My goal with this post is to help further develop the idea, after having the chance to reflect on it for a while.

There is something going on, and it does have to do with an angry God, but this picture of a God of anger and fear seems to co-exist alongside the experience of the love of Jesus. It’s an odd mix of the love of Jesus for those on the inside of the church, with a simultaneous focus on anger and hellfire for those on the outside – including you, if you “fall away.” The “monster god” is thus not a god who is only angry, but a god who is deeply loving to those on the inside and full of wrath towards those on the outside.

This “two-faced God” (to borrow a phrase from Michael Hardin) means you can go to church and sing songs about the love of Jesus, and then hear a sermon by a very angry white dude about how we should fear our nation being corrupted and destroyed by [insert name of scapegoated minority group here]. In short, we experience love and compassion on the inside, but are taught that those on the outside should be feared and hated. They get wrath. This reinforces people’s natural tendency to feel love for their own family, race, nation, and religion, and to demonize, criminalize, and dehumanize those outside the boundaries. That’s why evangelicals can experience love themselves, and yet lack compassion for others, being instead driven by fear and anger towards them.

People in that environment are therefore not meditating on an angry “monster God” alone. The picture of God they have somehow simultaneously consists of the experience of the love of Jesus (which I do not doubt is genuine) mixed together with week after week of cultivating anger and fear to those perceived as enemies from the pulpit. Sitting in that atmosphere week after week, year after year, shapes your brain. It essentially stunts a person’s moral development. The course of moral development is supposed to go from being loved, leading one to extend that same love towards others, developing socially. This toxic theology however keeps people inwardly focused in a sense of fear-based reactionary self-protection. The neuroscience phenomenon Mike mentioned of building the social and compassionate part of our brain thus does not happen, because this preaching of fear and anger towards outsiders strengthens the reactionary fear-based part of our brain, the amygdala. To put this in more theological terms, while they experience the love of Jesus, they do not follow the teaching of Jesus. Jesus had hard words for people like that,

I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!’ (Matthew 7:23)

Jesus links faithfulness to how we treat others, and this is most seen in how we treat those who we regard the least. John echos this when he writes,

"Whoever says, “I know him,” but does not do what he commands is a liar, and the truth is not in that person."

These are hard sayings, and I hope we are able to hear them. What is being expressed, in the strongest of terms, is that our experience of God's love is not worth much if it does not translate into showing compassion to others. It's like a flower that is planted, but does not grow out of the dirt.

This understanding of evangelicalism’s two-faced God is especially important for the “nicer” evangelical churches to recognize. Here I do not mean the churches where the pastor wears skinny jeans and a soul patch, but underneath still preaches the two-faced God. I mean the genuinely nice churches who only talk about grace and love, the churches that you and I would want to go to. Because evangelicalism is so fluid, those nice churches are filled with people who come from churches that preached the two-faced God. Almost never is it acknowledged in those nice churches that there are people in the congregation who are still carrying wounds from that past church experience. When it is acknowledged, it is almost always in the context of the person having misunderstood. You must have gotten the wrong impression of who God is. It’s always your personal problem, as opposed to us recognizing that this two-faced God of love and hate is very widespread within white evangelicalism, and addressing that.

In other words, the problem is not simply that the person has gotten an angry picture of God, and now simply needs to hear of the love and grace of Jesus. They have experienced a God who is both loving and hateful, and as a consequence they have been damaged by that. To the extent that they have preached this non-gospel of “God hates you and has a wonderful plan for your life,” they have hurt others. Perhaps a father severed his relationship with his gay son because his pastor told him that was tough love. Whatever the specifics, many live with the fallout of relationships that they have severed because of this toxic theology when it is lived out.

Simply preaching God’s love is not an antidote to this, because they have been taught that there is no contradiction in God being both loving and hateful, nor is there a problem with their being both loving (to insiders) and hateful (to outsiders) themselves. Instead of their experience of God’s love leading them to follow the teaching of Jesus and caring for the least, this two-faced God theology has taught them to ignore the love they experience, and instead be driven by fear and anger which is pounded into people’s psyches by what they hear Sunday after Sunday, not to mention their diet of angry pundits and media that they consume 24-7.

I know that it is hard to face this, which is perhaps why these nice evangelical churches so often avoid it. But I really hope that the grace-focused evangelical churches can find the courage and humility to address this toxic theology head-on, and help people kick-start their hardened hearts, and move towards growing in compassion. Sometimes to find healing, to find what is good and beautiful, we need to first face the ugliness in ourselves and in our communities.

Did Jesus Break Old Testament Law?

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 28 Jan 2017 04:43:00 +0000

Did Jesus break Old Testament law? Looking at the Gospels it is clear that Jesus would say "no" while the Pharisees would say "yes." We read repeatedly in all four Gospel accounts that Jesus was accused by the Jewish religious leaders and biblical scholars of his day of being a lawbreaker and sinner.

So did Jesus actually break Old Testament laws? A common conservative response to this is to claim that Jesus did not break any actual biblical laws, and instead only broke "traditions of men" that had been added on top of the Torah. The implication therefore is that there is nothing wrong with the Bible, God's law, but only with the extra "man-made" traditions added on top of it.

The phrase "traditions of men" comes from something Jesus says in Mark regarding the practice of ceremonial washing of hands. As the Gospel writer explains,

The Pharisees and all the Jews do not eat unless they give their hands a ceremonial washing, holding to the tradition of the elders. So the Pharisees and teachers of the law asked Jesus, "Why don’t your disciples live according to the tradition of the elders instead of eating their food with defiled hands?" (Mark 7:3,5).

Jesus answers in response, "You have let go of the commands of God and are holding on to human traditions" (v. 9), or more literally, "traditions of men." Jesus then calls the crowds to himself and declares,

"Listen to me, everyone, and understand this. Nothing outside a person can defile them by going into them. Rather, it is what comes out of a person that defiles them... Don’t you see that nothing that enters a person from the outside can defile them? For it doesn’t go into their heart but into their stomach, and then out of the body." In saying this, Jesus declared all foods clean. (Mark 7:14-19).

Note the conclusion made here by Mark: "In saying this, Jesus declared all foods clean." Jesus was not simply rejecting the traditions of the elders in regards to hand washing, he was rejecting the biblical teaching of uncleanliness altogether. This is clearly an example of breaking with the Old Testament law. The Old Testament forbids eating certain foods. Jesus rejects these laws, declaring all foods clean. However, Jesus would not agree that this makes him a lawbreaker. Jesus continues,

"What comes out of a person is what defiles them. For it is from within, out of a person’s heart, that evil thoughts come—sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly. All these evils come from inside and defile a person." (Mark 7:20-23)

Jesus is here re-defining the definition of what makes a person unclean or defiled. As always, his focus is on a person's faithfulness not being defined by outward signs (diet, circumcision, dress, Sabbath) but on acts of love and goodness. Jesus consistently taught that the purpose of the law is to lead people to love, and consequently he is willing to break Old Testament laws in order to prioritize love.

Let's take a look at another example of this, Jesus healing on the Sabbath. We read in John 5 of an encounter between Jesus and man who had been paralyzed for thirty-eight years. Jesus says to him "Get up! Pick up your mat and walk” (John 5:8). The Jewish leaders see the man and say to him “It is the Sabbath; the law forbids you to carry your mat.” (v 10).

Again, here it is typical of conservative commentators to claim that Jesus was not breaking the Sabbath, but was merely breaking the "traditions of men." Indeed, when the Jewish leaders say "the law forbids you to carry your mat" they are referring to the Oral Torah.

A little background may be helpful here: Jews at the time of Jesus believed that both the Written Torah and the Oral Torah were transmitted directly from God to Moses on Mount Sinai. This belief is still today a central tenant of faith for Orthodox Jews, while Conservative Jews, and to a greater extent, Reform Jews today see themselves as empowered to formulate their own interpretations -- much in the same way as Jesus did.

The Oral Law was put into writing between 200-220 AD and is known as the Mishnah. The Mishnah, in the tractate Shabbat, defines how the Sabbath is to be observed, and specifically forbids carrying things on the Sabbath -- like, for example, mats. The Mishnah also contains the instructions on ceremonial hand washing that we discussed earlier. While these are additional ceremonial practices added on top of biblical cleanliness laws (and as we have seen, Jesus breaks with both this added tradition and with the cleanliness laws), the Sabbath regulations found in the Mishnah are, in contrast, an example of how Judaism understood and interpreted the Sabbath law.

We might compare this to how the Supreme Court interprets the Constitution. We do not simply look at the Constitution alone, but at how it has been interpreted in these Supreme Court rulings. This dictates how our laws are practiced. In the same way the Oral Law or Mishnah defined how the Sabbath was to be practiced, and Jesus would have been well aware that telling this man to carry his mat was clearly a violation of this. Jesus does not do this because he was unaware or even indifferent to the Oral Law. He does this to provoke. That is why he healed on the Sabbath in the first place. He could have easily waited one day to heal the man. In response to this, the Jewish religious leaders then confront Jesus.

In his defense Jesus said to them, "My Father is always at his work to this very day, and I too am working." For this reason they tried all the more to kill him; not only was he breaking the Sabbath, but he was even calling God his own Father, making himself equal with God. (John 5:17-18)

Note here that Jesus does not even attempt to make the argument that he was not doing work on the Sabbath. He instead argues that God is always working, and that in faithfulness to God, he is working, too. It's quite provocative to use the word "work" here, as the reaction of the religious leaders being so outraged that they wanted to kill him makes clear. Further, John does not frame this as a misunderstanding, nor does he differentiate between the Written and Oral Law. Rather John flatly declares that Jesus was "breaking the Sabbath" (v18). Again, we have another example of how Jesus prioritized caring for people over observance of law, and even went out of his way to be seen as breaking biblical laws in the eyes of the religious leaders of his day in order to make this point.

On another occasion Jesus pointedly asked the Pharisees, "Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath or not?" (Luke 14:3). Luke reports that they did not answer. However, we know from the Mishnah what their answer would have been. As Strack and Billerbeck state,

"The unanimous answer of the Pharisees would have been that healing on the Sabbath is allowed in the case of an immanent life-threatening illness, but is otherwise strictly forbidden." (Kommentar zum Neuen Testament aus Talmud und Midrasch, vol I, p 622, my translation from the German).

In other words, you must keep the Sabbath unless this will kill you. So while Jesus believed it was a duty to heal on the Sabbath -- because it was God's will to do good -- the Pharisees and religious leaders of Jesus' day would have clearly seen Jesus healing a man on the Sabbath who had been paralyzed for 38 years as a sinful act. As Eduard Lohse writes,

"While the rabbis could at most allow that the Sabbath could be desecrated as an exception in order to save a person's life, Jesus reversed this thinking: No longer was Sabbath and following the law seen as primary, rather people and their needs were placed above the Sabbath commandment." (Lohse, "Jesu Worte über den Sabbath" in Die Einheit des Neuen Testaments, p 63. My translation from the German)

Again we see that the priority of Jesus is always on people's needs and on acts of love. These supersede biblical laws and commands. If Jesus sees a person in need, he heals them, and he does not give a flip if that is a violation of the biblical law because the whole point of the law as Jesus saw it is to lead us to loving action. Jesus is not willing to wait one single day, and does not care that doing this makes people mad enough to kill him. In fact, he repeatedly seeks out this confrontation.

So the answer to the question of whether Jesus broke with concrete biblical commands is clearly, "Yes, he did so repeatedly." In addition to those mentioned here, Jesus also declined to participate in the execution of a woman caught in adultery (which the law commands), and instead forgives her. Note that there is no possibility for forgiveness for intentional sins in the Torah and its sacrificial system.

However, as noted earlier, Jesus would have adamantly insisted that in all of this breaking of laws, he was keeping Torah. Here it comes down to our approach to Scripture. Jesus is by no means a legalist, and therefore sees no problem with breaking particular commands so long as people's needs and love are being promoted. Doing this is how Jesus understood the fulfillment of Torah. The Pharisees in contrast had an approach to Scripture that assumed that the law should be kept, and that even if people seem to be hurt by this, Scripture should still be put first. Their view is basically, "The Bible says it, so that settles it."

In a great many ways, the way many of us have learned to read the Bible is a lot more reflective of the approach of the Pharisees than it is of Jesus (and somewhat ironically, Reform Judaism has an approach to Scripture that is quite reflective of the approach of Jesus, and not of the Pharisees). The reason I object to the argument that Jesus was only breaking with "traditions of men" and not with the Bible itself is because this strongly implies that all we need to do is find the right source -- the Bible -- and then we can just blindly trust it. That is categorically not what we see Jesus doing. We instead see him continually questioning and challenging Scripture and how it was interpreted and practiced, always doing so in the name of love.

We need to learn from Jesus how to do this ourselves. This is of course not easy. Making moral deliberations, deciding right from wrong, is hard work -- especially if you have been taught in church that you are incapable of doing so, as many of us have been. Fleshing out how to do this well is of course far beyond the scope of a single blog post. That's why I wrote Disarming Scripture, to help walk people through how to do that well.

What I will say however is that we must learn to approach Scripture in the way that Jesus did. We need to learn to appreciate how radical that is. It's right there, quite plainly in the Gospels. We just need to have eyes to see it. So when we see Jesus doing or saying something that is scandalous (which he does quite often), instead of attempting to argue why this is in fact not scandalous at all, ask yourself why Jesus might be doing this, and what we might be able to learn from it.

Can A Feminist Be Pro-Life?

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 23 Jan 2017 01:29:00 +0000

With the Women's March there's been talk about whether one can be a feminist and pro-life. The answer to this depends a lot on how one defines pro-life. Pro-life is often associated with acting to create laws which restrict women from access to abortion. Those laws frequently dis-proportionally effect lower-income women, and result in making abortion less safe, but not less frequent.

So if the goal is to reduce the amount of abortions, these laws appear to be very ineffective, and at the same time they also appear to hurt women. That's why I am pro-life, but not pro-law. Being pro-life for me means that I am pro-life across the board: It leads me to oppose the death penalty and torture. It leads me to support Black Lives Matter and believe we desperately need to reform our police and criminal justice system. It leads me to support LGBT rights and marriage equality. It leads me to feminism because feminism is about human rights. All of these are the direct consequences of my commitment to being pro-life, not simply in regards to abortion, but as an all-encompassing social ethic.

I do hope to see abortion become rare, but not at the cost of hurting women. As a consequence, I generally do not support what I see the majority of pro-life organizations doing, which is to focus on laws. I see this approach as ineffectual, and worse, hurtful. As a study by the World Health Organization concluded, abortion rates do no decline in countries where abortion is illegal, but what does increase is the risk to a woman's health. In other words, anti-abortion laws don't help reduce abortions, but they do harm women. That cannot be an acceptable outcome for someone who is pro-life.

I have increasingly come to see that with many issues, punitive laws don't seem to do much good, and often make things much worse. This has led me to move away from conservatism, and towards progressivism, motivated by my pro-life stance and desire to see people made whole and flourishing. One example is our prison system, which has become a factory for hardening inmates, rather than healing them. Because of this the alarming repeat offense rate is sadly not at all surprising. Locking someone up in the hell of prison life naturally breeds violence, not reform or repentance. People do not learn empathy by being shamed and dehumanized. Being "tough on crime" gains popular support by appealing to our most primitive impulses, but in the end results in a broken system that perpetuates hurt and cycles of violence.

So if laws restricting access are not the answer, what is? One rather obvious way to reduce abortion rates is by making contraception readily accessible and affordable. After all, women who do not have unplanned pregnancies don't get abortions. That means funding Planned Parenthood and keeping the Affordable Care Act should be supported by pro-lifers.

To be sure, it's a complicated issue, and I certainly do not have all the answers. But I do think there is room for conversation among progressives on both sides of the issue. I do believe that in the politically polarized state our country is in, we progressives, we feminists, we who share in common a commitment to justice and the value of human lives and human rights need to move away from the long history of both sides stigmatizing and demonizing the other, retreating into ever more polarized positions.

NOTE: Comments have been disabled for this post

Worlds Apart: Maintaining Personal Relationships as Political Opposites

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 23 Oct 2016 05:03:00 +0000

Photo credit: AP

This election cycle has been characterized by an unprecedented amount of polarizing discourse and outright hostility. There are strong feelings of alarm and moral outrage on both sides of the political divide. Many have reported getting into a fight with a friend or family member over the election.

From the perspective of relationship experts, the turn our political discourse has taken this election can be seen as a case-book example of exactly how not to speak if you value your personal relationships. Marriage researcher and therapist John Gottman famously identified four styles of interpersonal communication that his studies revealed as key predictors for divorce, ominously dubbing them the “four horsemen of the apocalypse.” They are criticism (of a person, rather than a behavior), contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling, and of the four, contempt has been found to be the greatest predictor of divorce.

As examples of contempt, the Gottman Institute lists “sarcasm, cynicism, name-calling, eyerolling, sneering, mockery, and hostile humor.” That kind of contempt is plain to see in one particular Presidential candidate who frequently calls people invectives like “disgusting” and “pigs.” But that spirit of contempt has spilled over into how people commonly characterize those on the other side of the political fence as well. It’s easy to see why speaking to your spouse with that kind of ugly animosity would not be good for a marriage. At the same time, this begs the question of how you can speak with a loved one when you find their political views deeply troubling and hurtful.

For some, the best policy seems to be avoiding the topic altogether. This is a matter of setting healthy boundaries that both respect, with the aim of setting aside these differences for the good of the relationship. Talking through these differences is a lot harder, and requires a good deal of moral maturity on the part of both partners. Those who do not possess that maturity, sensitivity, and sophisticated communication skills may need to go with the wisdom of “don’t try this at home.”

For those who do want to venture into talking about these things with a loved one who is a political opposite, it’s critical to be able to speak in a way that is not condemning, disrespectful, or degrading. That is not a matter of agreeing on the issues, but on how you speak with each other, even when there is strong disagreement. When we feel anger or anxiety – two strong feelings that this election has brought up in many people – our brains go into alarm-mode, making us cling to our beliefs, doubling-down on them, shutting ourselves off to the other.

The antidote to this is creating an environment of respect, where you both feel socially safe and connected. A debate is not a place where the two parties change their views, it is an atmosphere where each side becomes all the more entrenched and polarized. Change can only happen in an atmosphere where both feel safe, respected, valued, understood. That entails how you speak with each other, but it also will likely mean at first that you need to get behind the issues, and seek to understand the vulnerable feelings (such as feeling threatened, wronged, or afraid) behind them. In other words, you genuinely try to understand the other, while also expressing how you feel.

That’s hard to do, because it means both of you managing your reactivity. However, if the goal is to come together, if the goal is to resolve conflict... and even if the goal is to win over the other, the only way to get there is through this type of vulnerable and respectful dialog. If one instead has a diet of rage, resentment and contempt fed to them through their favorite liberal or conservative news outlet, the result will be a continued polarization – moving further and further away, fostering fear, anger, and otherizing.

Jacob Hall Dies

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 02 Oct 2016 01:16:00 +0000

Like many have been, I've been praying together with my daughter every night for little Jacob Hall, since I heard the six-year-old boy had been shot in the leg by a teenager on a shooting spree, and was reported to be in critical condition in the hospital.

Jacob died today, surrounded by his family at Greenville Health System Children’s Hospital. The following is a statement issued by his parents, Renae and Rodger Hall,

“Jacob came into our lives six years and four months ago and changed it completely. He showed us how to love, laugh and smile even on days we did not want to. God gave him to us and he was taken away from us by a senseless act.

We know that Jacob has already forgiven this child for what he did to him and his family because that's the kind of child he was. Jacob was sent to this earth for this short a period of time to show us that there is such a thing as pure love. Jacob is in heaven with God now and everyone who loves him. Words cannot express how much we will miss him.”

I want to follow the example of Jacob and his parents, and hold on to pure love and forgiveness in the middle of a world that is filled with hurt and injustice. But right now I'm just feeling really sad. Goodbye Jacob.

Losing My Faith... In The Police

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 24 Sep 2016 20:23:00 +0000

I used to be a big fan of the police. I grew up watching Adam-12 on TV and had that image of the police instilled in my head. I saw cops as the heroes, the good guys, those who were there to "serve and protect."

I used to think that if there was a problem you could call 911 for help. But now I have to first ask myself beforehand "Will this make things worse if I call? Will it escalate the situation and cause harm, even possibly resulting in killing?" For example, if I see a homeless guy acting erratic -- so that I am concerned that he may be a danger to himself or others -- I would want to be able to call the police, believing that they would send someone who is trained in how to help him and keep him safe. Instead I need to consider the possibility that the police may come and kill him on the street. That is not hypothetical. It has become almost a common occurrence that the mentally ill are killed by police, rather than helped.

So while I began with a positive "Adam-12 view" of the police as a kid, and carried that view into adulthood, that view has changed. The reason it has changed is primarily because the prevalence of cel phone cameras and social media has allowed me, as a middle class white guy, to see and understand the experiences of people of color and the very different way they experience the police. So while one can indeed trace a trend of the police becoming increasingly militaristic, a big part is also simply me being able to see the reality those less privileged than I have experienced for a long time. So Adam-12 is not something that belongs to the past, but is more a picture of what the police ought to be like.

Police ought to be there to make things better, safer, and just. However, rather than using techniques to deescalate a situation, police commonly escalate situations, making things unsafe and often deadly. They make things worse, and because of that, I hesitate to call. I used to think that the police were there to help. Now I think of them as dangerous, unsafe, and incompetent. Incompetent when it comes to knowing how to deescalate a dangerous situation. Instead they escalate.

Now let me stress that I am not a pacifist. If I felt that I was in danger, say if there was someone trying to break into my home, I would definitely call the police, and would be glad that they had guns with them. That is the extreme situation. But there are lots of other situations where that military approach is completely unnecessary and wrong. For example with killing mentally ill people, rather than helping them.

So while I used to trust the police, I find that all the stories of them killing the mentally ill, and killing people of color -- and doing so with complete impunity -- has eroded that trust. In its place is mistrust. I have come to see the police like I would see an occupying military force. I experience them as a danger. I fear them. In an emergency I would still call 911, but I always have to ask myself if doing so would make things worse, and often don't call because of this.

When I think about how resistant police unions have been to reform in these areas -- including resisting training proposed by the DOJ to teach police how to deal with implicit bias, provide tools for deescalation that keep both officers and citizens safer, and focus on "community policing," rather than seeing citizens antagonistically as "bad guys" and threats -- it becomes abundantly clear that this is not simply a matter of a few bad apples, but is a systemic problem with deep roots in the culture of the police force. That police culture, rather than learning from these insights, has become increasingly militaristic, antagonistic, and dangerous, resisting any kind of reform or education. If you speak out for reform, whether from within the police or from without, you will be labeled as anti-blue.

In many ways this loss of trust in the police parallels people's experience of losing their faith. Just as the Catholic church acted as an institution to cover-up scandal and wrongdoing in the church, the police unions also seek to block reform. Just as abuse from a priest erodes our trust in religion, the deadly and inhumane actions of the police erodes our trust in the law and in our legal system. Finally, just as I am sure there are plenty of good and loving people sitting in the pews and behind the pulpits of churches, I am also sure that there are plenty of good cops out there, too. That being the case however does not help the very real systemic problem that perpetuates a culture of militaristic violence in the police force and resists any kind of meaningful reform.

So I find myself in the same place with the police as I do with my faith. I still consider myself a Christian and believe in the way of Jesus, but I need to constantly stress that I do not support -- and in fact am profoundly morally opposed to -- what conservative evangelicals support. Similarly, I still believe in the police of Adam-12; I believe that they could be good. I hope we can get to that. Not in a naive-childish way (the show was admittedly pretty naive), but in a deep, realistic and grown-up way. However that means repentance, and not just the repentance as individuals (which while important, can function as a scapegoat for the system), but also the repentance and reform of the system, too. That is the only way to get to real justice.

We are a long way from that. At best we are, I am, at a place of seeing the sin of the system. Just as I have come to see the sin of my faith, I also have come to see the sin of my country's criminal justice system. That is hard to face, but it's important to face, and I am grateful to Black Lives Matter and others for shining a light on this. It would be easy to disassociate myself from both my faith and the police, to see myself as good and "them" as bad. But I want to try to own it. This is my faith, my country, and it is profoundly broken and in need of reform.

P.S. If you would like some ideas of what that reform could look like, here is a good place to start.