Aedificium

… of Matthew 21.31-32. Dedicated to today’s whitened sepulchers.

“Look, I’m trying to set it straight with you guys. The abortionists and gays and the liberals! are gonna be in God’s world before most of you guys who think you’re in the Right. I mean, guys like John, King, and Wallis, and Edwards and Obama talked about hope and justice and you don’t give them the time of day, but “those other guys” do, and even after seeing what King did and Wallis is doing and what Edwards and Obama are fighting for, you still won’t change your minds and believe them!”

Stdogbert alerted me to this little piece from Reuters earlier in the afternoon and suggested that it might be blogworthy. Yep, sure is; any time an American President gets involved with trying to bring peace to the Middle East via a resolution to the Israel-Palestine contest, there’s going to be something to talk, write, read, or blog about.

This sudden interest by Bush in the Middle East peace process is remarkable. Obviously, every President has had an interest in it and they all have been involved to varying degrees, but given the circumstances going on in Iraq (and perhaps Iran in the disturbingly-near future), for Bush to start pandering peace, especially by appealing to Jesus’ beatitude to being peacemakers, when he has so much blood on his hands in the region is hypocritical and disingenuous, or just plain clueless. (My guess is it’s the last.) What fascinates me, however, is how an evangelical President like Bush is going against the old grain with this little peace-making visit. Whatever else the Bush Presidency may be remembered as, I certainly will not-so-fondly remember it as the Presidency who tried to help God out in bringing in the so-called “End Times.” I don’t think any other President has done more that, at least on the surface of things, seems to speed up the timetable to Armageddon in the Bob Hagee-an, Jack van Impe-an, Hal Lindsey-an sense.

Not too long ago, during a call for congregational prayer requests, a fellow in our church asked the pastor and church to pray for peace in the Middle East. The pastor took the opportunity to give a little mini-sermon/lecture that reflects the dispensationalist, Jack van Impean form of End Times politics. His response was something to the effect of “Well, I’m not sure that we can really do that, [name], because the Bible tells us that there will not be peace in the Middle East until the Lord Jesus returns. No matter how many Presidents, ambassadors, Nobel Peace Prize winners, and humanitarians argue for peace and work for peace, it’s just not going to happen until then, and so I think that anything we do that tries to make peace there is just getting in God’s way. But I’ll pray for Jesus’ return and that he comes soon so that we can have peace in Israel soon.” Many evangelicals, particularly those reared and raised and under the continued influence of more traditional, 1950s-60s evangelicalism, and practically all self-proclaimed fundamentalists would agree with the pastor’s assessment here. Not too many “new” or “younger evangelicals” would, however.

Probably not surprisingly, I don’t agree with this at all, because this is not what the Bible says. But that’s not the point here. The point is that Bush’s visit looks like he’s breaking rank with the older mainstream evangelical tradition he has sought to uphold as his standard for his Presidency. Just for once, for whatever motives, he is appealing to the Christian beatitude of peacableness as represented by Jesus rather than the imperialized and horrific vision of the Revelation. I have to give him credit for this.

If Bush’s effort here is doomed to fail, as I think it is, it’s not because it’s foretold in the Scriptures that it will, but that it’s just too hard of a sell. It’s because Middle East leaders can’t trust him, or the US in general, and that is simply because the track record of US involvement in this part of the world isn’t exactly worthy of trust. For that, we can’t blame the Bible, but only those who think they are doing what it says God wants them to do.

Ummm…whatever, man. You’ll need your speakers on.  Content not exactly endorsed by Aedificium, or Benedict either.

It is now just over 7 hours since the death of the Reverend Jerry Falwell. While I certainly am not capable of offering anything like a eulogy for this man, I can’t help but feel something like a twinge of … disappointment? Relief? Hope? Not too many people can stir up the kinds of mixed emotions that I suspect the news of Falwell’s passing will awaken in thousands, perhaps millions, of Americans.

The fact is that today the United States lost one of its most controversial and yet influential figures of recent history. The Thomas Road Baptist church lost its founder, shepherd, and senior pastor. Liberty University lost its founder and president. The remnants of the Moral Majority lost its founder, and many in the Religious Right looked to Falwell for moral guidance in developing a Christian response to politics with some clout. Regardless of what we think–thought–of Falwell’s ideas and of the type of leadership he represented, it is still true that American politics and its relationship to the churches was transformed, perhaps permanently. Whatever the state of affairs vis a vis the separation of the State and the Church (by which I only mean Institutional Religion, not simply Christian churches), that relationship is not likely to ever be the same. History will help us decide whether or not that is a good thing.

I myself owe a considerable debt to Jerry Falwell, although he never knew it. His deeply offensive comments about Muhammad and of those who practice alternative lifestyles provoked in me such anger, not simply over his remarks, but over the fact that his comments were likely to be taken as representative of all Christians, that I decided that I could not sit back while Christianity went on an offensive of hate and intolerance to those “not us.” For me, that entailed returning to school, first to seminary and ultimately on for my doctorate in Religion.

And despite the fact that Rev. Falwell’s beliefs did not speak for many, or even most, of those who profess to be Christians (including myself, obviously), I have to admit that he had the stones to actually believe in something and he believed that he was right. There was simply no room for gray areas or wishywashiness in Falwell’s psyche or his religious belief system. I think that he was dead wrong on a lot. So did a lot of people. But it is easy to find critics. It’s not so easy, I’m discovering, to find churchgoers who believe in anything other than Falwell’s “wrongness,” but they nothing to replace that wrong with. It was easy to make Falwell the scapegoat for intransigent, stubborn, judgmental fundamentalism across the Christian board. But the work of putting together something (an alternative “Christian” worldview, perhaps?) to replace the legend that passed today is something else altogether. I am hopeful that this can still be done, despite the fact that there are plenty of other Jerry Falwells that are more than ready to carry on his vision. “Fundy-bashing” is in vogue, but the act of building and planting something that we believe in, other than the wrong-headedness of “them,” has barely begun. Perhaps with Rev. Falwell’s passing, we can get past some of the vilification and reach out to each other for reconciliation. I guess that may be asking too much, but part of being hopeful is having hope even in the absence of much optimism.

Brother Falwell, I’ll meet you on / God’s Golden Shores.

For those readers who have been looking forward to the second part of my original “Failing Religion” post back in … what, March, was it?… I apologize for the delay. But I’m ready now.

It is a little tough to find a good entree to the topic here, so perhaps a story is the way to go. Beloved Wife spent her morning listening to the teens in our church announce their intent to seek confirmation as members in our church, for which each prospective confirmand would read their own personal statement of faith and the church Board would vote to confirm the statement and the “stater” as a member of the community.

Sounded good, if a little routine and rather “going through the motions”-ish. While this was happening in the hall, I was leading a small gathering of folks in our continued study of the Epistle of Jude. Eventually we caught up with each other after church, and Beloved Wife, member of our voting Board of Elders, was clearly distraught, having been absolutely shocked and appalled by what she was hearing from our teen-aged Seekers and which was being approved as Christian statements of faith and worthy of membership into our Christian community of faith. I’m actually being told that “appalled” is not even the right word, even though it’s true; she feels more “betrayed.” Suffice it to say that if she did not know where she was, she would not have been able to discern the difference between our Christian church, our community of faith in Jesus of Nazareth, and any typical Unitarian-Universalist congregation, based on what was acceptable as “Christian” statements of faith.

And so where our religious education has failed Americans in general in their responsibilities as members of both local and global socio-political-cultural communities, it is failing our young people today even in our own communities of faith. I can only speak, of course, from my own experience, but I can safely say that my Muslim and Jewish friends in this country admit of the same problem in their own faith communities. In a word, the problem is that our churches today have simply not learned an appropriate, Christian response to the very fact that we live in a pluralistic world and have largely been unable to steer a course between a theological wishy-washiness that doesn’t even resemble anything remotely Christian or hyper-biblicistic stance that is unable to see the good in that which is not “us.” In other words, the failure of Christian faith communities in both the mainline and evangelical worlds is resulting in the inability of these communities to define who they are in a way that is “Christian” in any meaningful way.

What is interesting is that the mainline and evangelical Protestant wings of American Christianity seem aware of this, at least to an extent. In very broad, admittedly unfair, general terms, mainline Christians have historically excelled at recognizing the social and political importance of the Gospel of Jesus and the good news of the Hebrew Prophets, but overtime these aspects have overshadowed the importance of actually teaching the Text itself, which is now only incidental in the mission to work towards a just world. To be sure, I believe that this is absolutely a crucial component of the Gospel of Christ, and any Gospel that fails to preach and live out this most evident and tangible call of the Prophets and of Christ is half a gospel at best. But it is increasingly evident that this aspect of creating a just world is assumed, not taught, and accordingly the young people in today’s social-justice-aware mainline churches have no idea what the Bible’s actual teachings are on justice, poverty, stewardship, ethical community politics and economics, and so forth. The result is that the majority of these young people who stay in a faith community see little or no difference between Christianity and other religions and faith traditions who may be undertaking the same thing, and feel themselves to be free to hold any beliefs they want so long as their community supports them as Christian members.

The mainstream evangelical world, on the other hand, has historically been strong in its Christian and biblical education and in perpetuating its community identity through identification with its interpretation and knowledge of the Bible. Evangelicalism’s emphasis on the biblical basis of salvation theology through the Messiahship of Jesus is perhaps unparalleled except for Fundamentalist churches. The emphasis on Jesus’ Messiahship is, after all, the defining difference between Christians and those of other faith traditions and communities, and evangelicalism’s emphasis has preserved that identity perhaps more than any other “flavor” of American Christianity. On the other hand, my long experience with evangelical communities is that where they are strong in basic bible knowledge and in promoting Jesus as the Messiah, the tendency has been for the last 3 or 4 decades to emphasize this aspect at the nearly complete expense of the socio-political dynamic that is so strong in the mainline churches, along with an over emphasis on the God-given authority of the State and the nearly complete absence of emphasis on the prophetic critique of power in the prophets and in Jesus’ life. (Which leads, by the way, to a complete misapprehension of the book of Revelation, but that’s a topic for another day.) The implications of these shortcomings are enormous, and they are disturbing, and fortunately more and more people (mostly between the ages of 20 and 40, from what I can tell, although obviously there are exceptions) are being convicted by evangelicalism’s complicity in the apocalyptic state of affairs that we currently find the world in.

I know that these are generalizations, and that there is a huge group of silent witnesses, as it were, between these two typical representations. But the bottom line is that mainline Protestantism and mainstream evangelicalism are both at a crossroads. The former are in jeopardy of losing their rich heritage and identity as socially-conscious Christians, and the latter are in danger of losing the once-honorable badge of “evangelical” as more and more younger evangelicals are shifting their attention to the traditional emphases of liberal protestant churches. The mainliners are terrified that if they “go biblical” in their social program they will be identified as “fundamentalists” and believe they will have no choice but to join with “the powers,” as they believe evangelicals have done. On the other side, evangelicals cannot see how to become more socially prophetic and critical of “the powers” without either becoming “godless liberal relativists” and cultural pluralists or feel like they are abandoning “the clear teachings of the Bible” on a proper Christian relationship to the State.

Once again, I think it comes down to religious, and in this case specifically Christian, education. Neither “side” demonstrates an ability to provide a more authentically prophetic Biblical and Christian interpretation of either Bible or World. Churches such as the one I belong to need to reassert their Christian identity through deeper wrestling with the Word, and churches such as those who emphasize the Word made Flesh need to reaffirm their presence in the World that “judges not, lest ye be judged.” We are beginning to see some glimpses of both beginning to do just this, which is tremendous. Still, we have a long way to go, and a lot of work to be done. I feel that the first task to accomplish is to simply talk to each other, and not in the way Democratic and Republican politicians do, and certainly not in the way liberal and conservative Christians have done. Let’s actually sit and read the text together and learn how an authentically Christian prophetic ministry can speak to power, affirm justice, and serve as stewards in this world in a way that is recognizably Christian, even while we recognize our indebtedness to those who do not share our specific faith.

Regular readers of this blog (and of others where I’ve left comments) know that we homeschool our kids and also that while I support teaching religions in schools I’m not so keen on teaching “The Bible.” (I have a feeling this could be a longish post. You are forewarned. ) And now, suddenly, I’m confronted with the necessity of choosing a homeschool curriculum that includes, of course, “The Bible,” for my second-grader.

Homeschool parents know that the three big clearing houses for educational supplies and curricula are Evangelical and/or Fundamentalist in orientation. Some of them, such as Bob Jones Press (representing the Fundamentalist wing), write their own stuff. Logos is another one that is very focused in its stuff, not necessarily following the Fundamentalist curriculum (it does not, in fact) but in its very particular conservative Reformed/Providential emphasis. Logos does not market itself as a “home school clearinghouse” so much as it does its “classical-Christian” educational program, but with a decidedly conservative evangelical slant toward providential history and historical biblicism. The third, and biggest, player here is Veritas Press. Officially, Veritas is “unaffiliated,” and they carry everything from Penguin Classics to classical apologetics. It is, however, very much an Evangelical outfit that places the Bible at the center of its educational philosophy and markets its material specifically for Christian schools and for Christian homeschools.

So, here’s my dilemma, and it is largely the same dilemma I have with the idea of teaching the Bible in public schools. The reason why I can’t support teaching Bible in public schools is primarily because in the public, government supported schools, the curriculum is written and backed by the state, which would be tantamount to officially endorsing, in fact officially creating, a state-sponsored, official interpretation of the Bible. Not only would this be unconstitutional, but, especially in the current political climate and in the US’s role in the global economy, it would be especially dangerous and undesirable. No thanks.

Even supposing that such a curriculum could be written that was as value-neutral and non-sectarian as humanly (heck, even divinely) possible, there is the issue of Who is going to teach this? What criteria of qualification to teach the Bible in a public school will satisfy the parents and students? It simply won’t work. Churches can’t even agree on a Bible curriculum. Fundamentalist parents would never permit their kids to be taught Bible by a biblical scholar of any denomination that isn’t Fundamentalist in its outlook no matter how conservative or pious that scholar might be. Evangelicals committed to an Evangelical worldview and interpretation of the Bible would be only slightly more accepting of the same figure. But even here it would be rather out of the question to accept a completely secular Bible teacher who is unaffiliated with any church and/or trained in a “secular” university. Mainline Protestants, as well as students whose families are not committed to any flavor of Christianity (to say nothing of Jewish or Muslim students) will reject a bible teacher from Bob Jones or Liberty. It goes both ways.

This brings us back to “Christian schools” and “Christian” homeschools and the curriculum. Christian schools largely arose in reaction to political decisions to not include (or no longer include) Bible in the public school curriculum. Over time, these schools became the training grounds for kids (again, see yesterday’s post) to combat rising tides of secularism and moral deficiency in the broader American culture, and the solution to this in Evangelicalism has been “more Bible!” and, especially in Fundamentalist schools, hyper-isolationism. So the schools continued to emphasize the centrality of the Bible in every aspect of the curriculum, and the curriculum for the Bible became the centerpiece of the entire endeavor. But here the problem is fully illustrated; the only Bible curricula out there for primary and secondary education are defined, written, supported, and distributed by Evangelical or Fundamentalist clearing houses and distributors like CBD, Veritas Press, Logos, and Bob Jones. It may not be the State, but the impression is that if you’re going to do Christian ed, you have to do it this way or it’s not Christian. There are, of course, much smaller places that do in fact have more mainline Bible curricula, but these are primarily geared towards Sunday Schools and not for large-scale, institutional Evangelical primary and secondary education.

For those of us who homeschool, who are Christian, and who are (at best) highly suspicious of the Evangelical agenda and of its particular spin on history and biblical interpretation, this creates an ethical dilemma. Indeed, homeschool teachers, by definition amateurs in most of the subjects in the curriculum (if not completely ignorant!) are more or less at the mercy of the defined curriculum they settle on, or, if done in a local cooperative network, on whatever the board of directors settles on. If you as the parent of a homeschooled child do not agree with the cooperative’s adopted curriculum for the Bible component, or don’t like the choices available to do it on your own, and lack the competency (or the time) to draw up your own curriculum, well, good luck to you.

As someone who emphasizes the need for local, community-oriented education and economy and who tries to resist our dependencies on large-scale, institutionalized forms of education and economics (see some of my earlier posts), homeschooling is perhaps the best option we have. Part of good stewardship is being a good steward to our children, and not simply to our land our our heritage. Small, local cooperative networks of homeschooling has tremendous potential to offer an education to our kids that advocates the kind of ethical education that is lacking elsewhere. It is, by necessity, local community oriented. However, I have not seen this, despite its potential. From what I can see, homeschooling goes either in the direction of individualism, whereby individual families insulate their kids from anything that could contaminate the indoctrination they are giving their kids, while coopting the word “education” in the process. Or it takes the approach of parochialism, where similar and largely like-minded homeschool parents band together in a kind of wagon circle to protect what’s inside from outside influences, including the influences of “formal education” that Christian schools have adopted from public schools. In such groups, I’ve learned from experience that it’s their way, or the highway. Their Bible curriculum is nothing short of the gospel, as defined by the experts in Christian education. Take it … or leave it. This isn’t local, community oriented education at this point. It’s ghettoizing indoctrination.

Now, I’m a classical historian, a biblical scholar, and historian of religions by training, was “brought-up-born-again,” an active member of a left-leaning mainline suburban church, and a certified lay minister in my denomination. Beloved wife is a former public school elementary teacher, private tutor, current Sunday school teacher, church elder, and chair of the children’s ed committee at said church, and she’s also a leader in our local SBC evangelical church’s MOPS and AWANA groups. If ever there should be a couple who could figure out a good history and Bible curriculum for kids, we’re it. What might this look like?

I don’t know yet, but we’re working on it. In the next few days, maybe, look for a post on some criteria that such a curriculum might contain. And as always, I’m happy to take suggestions.

Some thoughts after writing sections of a paper on eschatological discourse in the Bible, Talmuds, and Qur’an all night…

Class discussion today was interesting, to say the least. Topic was American fundamentalism, and we came at the topic from two directions. One, politics and the media, and Two, the role of education in “the culture wars” over “family values.” Combination of things that came up got me thinking about a whole bunch of related topics.

First of all, I should just say that while I realize all to well the baggage that “born again” carries with it, as a symbol or metaphor it’s pretty darn good, and it’s a shame that this element of what Jesus was getting at is tarnished by so much judgmentalism and hypocrisy and especially of the triteness it connotes these days.

David James Duncan recently wrote that he was raised a chosen person, although it was not of his choosing. That’s an equally fitting description of so many Gen X and Y’ers who were like me, being born and brought up born again. I’m all for preserving and passing on the family and community faith. Of course. And in the context of today’s class, several students, God bless ‘em, realized that for kids like this, the culture wars (such as they are today) aren’t being fought on fair turf. They’re being fought precisely on those kids who are being brought up born again. Born again/evangelical parents are not out in the trenches to fight for what they think is “the Christian worldview” (which is just as well, because I can’t even find THE Christian worldview, but that’s a post for another day). They’re putting their kids in the trenches; just look at Ron Luce’s Battle Cry. But it’s also evident in the educational process. We have “Christian Colleges,” like the one I went to way back when, a very typical, “this-is-your-father’s-evangelicalism-style” Christian college in Massachusetts. We have “Christian schools”, high schools and elementary schools, middle schools and preschools, out the wazoo. And they’re all evangelical schools, designed by and for evangelical parents and born again students. (And yes, I’m labelling here, knowing perfectly well that Parochial School are also Christian schools, but the “Christian School” label has been so coopted by Protestant Evangelicals with their heads up their … never mind.) And homeschool coops and individual homeschool families are pretty much radical vanguard of getting bona-fide Christian (read: evangelical) education that will ensure that our kids come to think the same way we do, or at least think the way we want them to think about our religion and our values.

Then I had one of those moments. How come we don’t have any “mainline” or “progressive” or (heaven forbid!) “liberal” Christian institutions of learning? There are Catholic ones. There are Evangelical ones. There are colleges and universities (perhaps most of them, in fact) that were founded by and affiliated with mainline denominations (like Methodists or Presbyterians) but who are no longer connected with their denominational ancestry. What is the deal here? For those of us who are uncomfortable with Evangelical hegemony over the role Christianity (and religion in general) could or should play in our society, why are there no other options for Protestants, or Jews, or Muslims, or whatever?

I have some thoughts, but I’m interested in hearing others’. Start things off; I’m going to bed, but will check in tomorrow and probably write a follow-up or two.

In the last few weeks in class, we’ve been discussing popular culture, religion, and the media, so Jeff Sharlet’s (of The Revealer) recent article in Rolling Stone and his comments on NPR come at an opportune moment. (BTW, JakeB has a good thing going over at his blog, and Sharlet even responded, so I encourage you to check it out.)

Sharlet’s article documents the alarming growth of a new evangelical youth movement known as Battle Cry, whose mission is to destroy “pop-culture terrorism.” Battle Cry strikes me as being a combination of Billy Graham Crusades, Promise Keepers, and Campus Crusade, only for kids. The leader of the movement, Ron Luce, is hell-bent (literally, it appears) on making sure that the “culture wars” survive at least one more generation. Apparently Luce is terrified that today’s youth will have nothing to contest when they grow into adults. Rest easy, Ron, there’ll be PLENTY, but you may be right that the issues that you think are life and death issues won’t be nearly as interesting or important as they were 15 years ago.

What we’re seeing here is the manifestation of fear, specifically the fear of losing a worldview that was so absolutely central to an earlier generation of a specific “community.” The Evangelical Community has prided itself on being the watchdog of morality since the 1950’s and was ideally placed (historically speaking) to confront what it perceived to be the secularist assault of subsequent decades. However, evangelicals are turning more and more to the more pressing issues that involve ethics and stewardship and justice more than they do individual morality. People like Ron Luce are feeling absolutely betrayed by their heritage, and it takes a media master like Luce to fuse this watchdog-mentality with the flotsam and jetsam of Evangelical Crusades, Billy-Graham and Campus style, and the Promise Keepers into a jihad like Battle Cry that targets the only real audience that has the emotional and hormonal capital to spend on stuff like this: today’s youth.

I’m certainly not going to deny that there is a whole lot of dehumanization and objectification of much of the pop culture that Luce and his Battle Crying minions feel they need to combat. The women’s lingerie industry, a favorite whipping boy (girl?) of Battle Criers and of the evangelical right in general, is a case in point, as Sharlet and Luce both recognize. (As would be the cover of the latest issue of Rolling Stone, where Sharlet’s article appears!) Objectification of women: bad. But, to deny women the right to take a little pride in their physical appearance, as Luce would seem to advocate, is absurd. Sure, there is wisdom in Jesus’ hyperbolically metaphoric injunction to cut off what causes you to sin, and if –if!–your latest issue of the Victoria’s Secret catalog causes you or your brother to sin, by all means, cancel your subscription, especially if you object to the fetishization of the sex goddesses in the thing. If drinking leads you or your brother/sister/neighbor into a life of sin and debauchery and violence, then cut it. But taken to the extreme, you get brainwashed kids who swear off A+W Root Beer (See the Stones article, referenced above). Reminds me of a fellow my dad once met years ago. Dad: Hey, can I get you a Pepsi? Friend: Nope, thanks, though; gave it up, gave it up when I found the LORD, when Jesus saved me. (pauses) But, I’ll take a beer if you got one of those…

In any case, while Luce’s furious criticism of the “secular media” and of the usual suspects of secularists, abortionists, liberals, Muslims, gays and lesbians, and so forth who are “conspiring” to destroy Christianity is the same schtick we’ve been hearing now for decades, he completely refuses to consider that there are more important issues we need to confront today. And as I’ve said, I think this stems from his own feeling of betrayal by the greater evangelical community. He cannot identify with the contemporary evangelical ethos that is growing on a daily basis, and so, like a jilted lover starving for the eros of his old passion or, like a former community member without a community to return to, (and we’ve all been there), rather than identify with another community he undertakes to practice jihad against his former confreres and form his own.

I use the word jihad here deliberately. Ron Luce and Battle Cry represent the mirror image of militant jihadist movements within Islam, which appeals to the young, the jilted, and the emotionally ideological who believe that everything their leader(s) believe in is under attack by some outside force. It fosters hate for those who are unlike them, and is violently antithetical to Christ’s injunction to love our enemies and to do good to those who hate us. For those of us who come from an evangelical heritage and who are participating in the growing movement of neo-evangelical ethics centered on justice, stewardship, and compassion, indeed, the culture wars aren’t over, but the site of the battle has shifted. For these neo-evangelicals, the battle for the minds of today’s youth isn’t going to be fought over lingerie and rootbeer and MTV, but over the ideologies of hate and injustice that, knowingly or unknowingly, Ron Luce and his Battle Criers promote in our young people. The trick is to engage without using the weapons of the enemy.

It was only a week ago that
we were out here walking this path, the
firm steps we took yielding to nothing.

But how different things can get, how
much things change in the blink of an eye.

What was once unyielding, solid and
firm has now become a raging torrent,
shifting this way and that, threatening
to drown out every last bit of solid
footing that only last week we were
so certain would hold us up.

I abandon my foothold and let
the new current bring me to a new
spot, or maybe even the same spot.

Only God knows.

One thing is certain.
If I fight too much,
I will freeze and drown.

Late last week I put up a post on Hermeneutics and Experience, that interpreting and reading Scripture depends on our ability to read the Book of Our Experience. Since then I’ve been running another, related topic through my mind. I think a lot about what happens when we read a text of any sort, or even engage in a conversation. When one person says a particular word to another person, there are certain things that can happen in response: (a) apathy, or no response (b) a “connection” is made between speaker and listener where both parties mutually understand what the word is supposed to imply, as in “inside jokes,” and (c) the speaker means one thing, but the listener “hears” or understands something totally different. The old joke about the woman who promises her new husband that “tonight is going to be the most beautiful night of your life,” who promptly spends his entire night looking expectantly out the window, comes to mind here. There is also the possibility that the speaker will use a word in a completely erroneous way, or use the wrong word in a given situation, which causes further complications in humorous or, unfortunately, destructive ways. And often enough, translation issues come up that can cause all kinds of confusion, especially in cases where a person might technically use the “right” word, but in the context it was spoken, might be exactly what the individual did NOT want to say, or has meanings to the hearer that the speaker would never have dreamed of.

Speech, though, is usually tailored and customized so that the listener gets maximum effect from what is said. Obviously this is true in politics, and it’s just as true in religion, and it’s just as true in the academy and anywhere else. Even though two parties might share the exact same word vocabulary in the exact same language, if the speaker ignores the fact that the listener does NOT share the same conceptual meaning behind the words spoken, the message will be either lost or radically misunderstood until the two can figure out what their common ground is. For example, if in speaking of where someone is, I might say “She’s off to the left.” Some hearers will now think “She’s a Democrat.” Others will think “She’s a liberal.” Others think “She’s a Mainline Protestant.” Others might come to the conclusion that she is physically to the left of where I’m referencing.

Texts and books work the same way, I think. When we read something, we’re taking in what the writer “says.” The writer, if she’s worth her salt, writes in such a way that her specific word will mean something that her readership will connect with in a way that both writer and reader mutually understand to be the same thing. He depends on the ability of a particular word or phrase to invoke specific images in the mind of the reader. Psychological, emotional, intellectual, mental, spiritual, and even physical responses can be stimulated by virtually any word we read, and these stimuli lie behind the word choice of the writer in the first place.

What I’m getting at is words can’t have a static, once-for-all-time meaning, especially when they’re translated from other languages, like Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, Arabic, and so forth. We, on the receiving end of the written text, simply cannot always know with absolute certainty what the text is really trying to say. This isn’t to say we shouldn’t try; we certainly should, and we should use every available tool at our disposal to at least establish a high degree of probability what a certain word or phrase or text might or probably means. When we reduce texts to one particular meaning, then the preacher I mentioned the other day is right, because we let our experience completely dominate whatever the text says, either what it really says, what it might say to us still, and what we silence the text form saying at all. Obviously this kind of reductionism is absurd, whether it’s the reductionism of the professional academic biblical source critic who analyzes the words and rhetoric of texts thought to lie behind the text as it exists, or the Fundamentalist who harmonizes away all the tensions and smooths out all the rough edges with a mishmash of selective literal and allegorical interpretations and who silences passages that, left on their own and understood in a more plain sense, might be offensive to moral sensibilities.

Close with an example. The Book of Ruth is a great narrative, but it uses a particular metaphor, or more specifically a particular euphemism, that Bible translators translate into English but which absolutely destroys the scene it takes place in. The Hebrew phrase in question is normally translated as “uncovered his feet.” In the scene, Ruth gets Boaz drunk and then, after he’s gone to bed, goes to his bed and “uncovers his feet” and lies down at “his feet.” I’ll let you all look it up yourselves, it’s Ruth 3. In Hebrew idiom, Ruth definitely uncovered something of Boaz, but it was definitely not his feet. To paraphrase Freud, sometimes a foot is just as foot (as in the case of the woman in Mark 14 who washed Jesus’ feet or Mary in John 12 who anointed his feet with oil or when Jesus washes his disciples’ feet in John 13). And sometimes, as in Ruth, it’s not. The whole book, for those with eyes to see and ear to hear, is loaded with sexual tension, not with little cartoons and flannel-graphs of Ruth lying down at the foot of Boaz’ bed.

This is a deliberately provocative example, but the point is that even in an obvious case, such as this, it is all too easy to deliberately or unwittingly misread what we read; in fact, in a book like the Bible, so laden with parables, poetry, parodies, and deliberately rich symbolic imagery, writers go out of their way to make sure that some things have two, three, four, or a hundred possible meanings. There is simply no way to prevent the words of a speaker or writer (or both, in the case of stories with dialog!) from taking on meanings beyond what their original symbolic intent was, especially when the texts are constructed on the images, metaphors, and genres of other texts, some of which we have, and some of which we don’t. Reducing these text of Scripture to the absurd is so tempting in the face of so many potential questions and misreadings; but it is precisely that potential that allows for 2000 years of interpretive tradition, a stream in which ours are just small tributaries that flows into a mighty river.