Pastor's Puddle

The year I began my Doctor of Ministry studies in Preaching, I took time to visit three sister Mennonite churches in hopes of hearing some preaching.  Instead of preaching, I got in on service project reporting Sunday, where all three churches were reporting on service trips done by youth and others.  I was devastated.  If an exit interviewer had asked me, "What is the gospel proclaimed by this church, what is the good news?" I think I would have said, the gospel is that Mennonites are nice people, in each case.  Little in these services was said about God, to God, from God.  But there was plenty of self congratulatory drivel.

Had I been looking for a church (or looking for God, or a word from or about God), I would not have been back, and likely would not have given another Mennonite church a try.  My response to these services was not smugness, but confession.  Any of these three churches could have been my church, planning such a service with my full approval.

But something happened in one of these services that changed me, and became the impetus for my D.Min. thesis.  During an open sharing time, a man rose to speak apologetically, because, he said, many people pray and do not experience healing.  He had been going blind, had surgery would some risk, and regained his sight.  Choking back tears he testified that God had given him his sight back, "I don't understand it, but I know that I was blind and now I can see."  I get choked up as I reflect on that moment.  And it changed my understanding of worship forever.

Worship is about God.  It is telling of God's might acts (Deuteronomy 6 and 1 Peter 2); it is bringing the concerns of our hearts to God as a community; and it is listening to God's voice.

The Worship Commission at College Mennonite did some serious work thinking about the purpose of worship before I moved to Goshen, and came to similar conclusions.  Sermons are not about the Bible, they are about God.  We preach from the Bible because we believe the Bible points to God.  Sermons are not a "how to" lecture to help us be better Christians, but an occasion for us to meet God, to know God better, and to proclaim who God is and what God is (God gives recovery of sight to the blind, for example).  We do not have a bulletin anymore, we have a worship folder.  Worship is not for sharing or receiving information, we have other places in the life of our congregation for that.  We do not share announcements.  In other words, we do our best not to talk to ourselves about each other, but to testify to each other about God, to bring our concerns to God, and listen for God's voice in our lives.

The greatest commandment is to love God with heart, soul, strength and mind.  Worship is where this love is expressed fully, together with other believers in a community of faith.

The Everence statement on birth control that says “Mennonites and related Anabaptists have not held values that prohibited them from using contraceptives," is technically accurate, but not fully honest.  Readers of this blog will know that Mennonites and related Anabaptists have held values that prohibited them from using contraceptives.  But they don't anymore.  In our conversations regarding sexual ethics, we are wise to recognize how dramatically thought and practice around this issue has changed over the last century.

I have found myself in several conversations lately about the authority of scripture.  Usually these discussions involve bemoaning or celebrating the decline in authority ascribed to the Bible within the church.  The bemoaners are saddened to see the loss of an important touchstone in the life of faith, the celebrators are happy to see that people are no longer relying on such superstitious and unscientific collection of writing.  Not surprisingly, I am among the bemoaners, and for several reasons, one of which I share here.

The odd thing about many people who explicitly reject the authority of scripture, is that they implicitly embrace it.  They embrace uniquely biblical values such as love, forgiveness, compassion, mercy, and a peculiar kind of justice that respects the voiceless and disenfranchised.  These values are central to the biblical story and its witness, they also mark an astonishing departure from the imperial values dominant in the world in which the Bible emerged.  If these values entered our lives from sources other than the Bible and those giving testimony to its moral worldview, what was that source?  Ancient imperial powers?  Rome?  Greece? Pre-Christian European paganism?  Western philosophy?  This is not to say the Bible is the only source for such values in the world, but for us as Christians it certainly is the primary one.

In the individualism of the age, we are reluctant to acknowledge our indebtedness to traditions for shaping who we are and how we think.  We somehow believe that we can create our own tradition of moral thought and practice ex nihilo (out of nothing).  To be authentic, we must reject external authority and forge our own way.  Yet the notion that we can forge our own way is an illusion.  Most of us are indebted to the Bible and those who witness to its world view for the values we hold dear.

Norman K. Gottwald, a scholar of the Hebrew Bible, takes a historical critical approach to the emergence of Israel among the city states of Canaan, and identifies a revolutionary movement valuing justice for the poor, forgiveness of debts, and a radical new way of thinking of the divine.  The values of this movement, Gottwald argues, come from the circumstances of their emergence, as they defy the oppression of Caananite urban dominance of the surrounding countryside.  The remarkable and new values of this movement survive because of a vital religious practice, the unique prophetic vocation, and unique circumstances of regional politics and geography.  One could be an atheist and embrace Gottwald's analysis of the biblical values which have shaped us.  In other words, an honest atheist could have some respect for biblical authority.

In the church, we do not take such a secular approach to the Bible, but see the movement of God in the emergence of these values in Israel, and later as they are embodied in Jesus and the church.  Walter Wink sees God at work in the reversal of the "domination system" as the biblical community emerges in the ancient near east.  Daniel Erlanger has written a playful comic book called Manna and Mercy, which develops the same theme.  This is just a tiny taste of those who have considered the emergence of the biblical values of love, forgiveness, compassion, mercy, and a peculiar kind of justice that respects the voiceless and disenfranchised, in a context where they were foreign.

The failure of biblical communities to fully live out these values is lamentable.  It is also not surprising.  The values of the "domination system" are compelling and powerful.  Counter revolutionary forces are always at work in human cultures.  For me this is what is at stake in conversations regarding biblical authority.  The biblical values I named above have always been threatened.  Unless we recognize God's role in giving them to us, I am concerned they will become an endangered species.

My boys constantly remind me of the power of heroes to capture young imaginations, and to inspire heroic fantasies in their young minds.  One of my childhood fantasies was standing calmly at the free throw line in a championship game, no seconds on the clock, with my team down by one.  I hit two free throws, we win.  And of course we always do so to great applause and accolades.  From Gilgamesh to Harry Potter, literature ancient and modern is filled with heroes, people who overcome, conquer, achieve, build, and avenge, by their own strength and intelligence, and always against great odds.  And we humans are always looking for heroes who emulate greatness, give us something to which we can aspire, and save us from the various kinds of monsters we fear.

Christian thought in general, and the Bible in particular, take a contrary view, countering the tendency of human cultures to venerate heroes with exhortations like Paul's "power is made perfect in weakness."  In the world of heroes and hero worshipers, which is to say the world in which we all live, this is utter nonsense.  In this world, power and strength are made perfect in power and strength (cf. Nietzsche).

The Bible's only real candidate for hero in this classical sense is David.  Yet upon closer look, David's claim to fame, according to the Bible, is that he is a man after God's own heart.  Time and time again, the figures that stand out in scripture do so because of faith that allows God to be at work in them.  Those who try to be the hero end up falling flat on their faces.  Moses is not permitted to enter the promised land because he was trying to play the hero.  The Bible can never let the story be about Moses, but God.  Naaman grouses about submersing himself in the Jordan seven times, rather than being asked to perform some heroic deed.  Even Jesus proves to be unheroic, only faithful.  Faithfulness is all that is asked of us.  Saints and martyrs are remembered for faithfulness, not heroism.  It is also worth noting that some of the Bible's prominent figures are  not only weak, but scoundrels, such as Jacob, yet God is at work in them.

Tripp York has written a haunting little book called The Purple Crown:  The Politics of Martyrdom.  York describes the Christian culture of martyrdom in the early church.  Christians saw martyrdom as a privilege, and gloried in it, almost morbidly so.  Yet even as Christians desired martyrdom, seeking martyrdom was prohibited, as was behaving in a deliberately careless way so as to ensure torture and death at the hands of Roman justice.  No heroes welcome!

In a hero worshiping world, how do we create an environment where faithfulness is celebrated rather than heroism?  Any ideas?  I offer this for our Lenten reflection.

David Brooks reflects some of my own thought on the ethos of sports and faith.

Gary Gutting, our neighbor over in South Bend, had this in today's times, which is giving me something to think about.

I have finished one book recently, and am working on another, each dealing with some facet of intellectual history.  This one makes the case that violence has decreased dramatically through human history, especially in the last several hundred years.  The author, Steven Pinker, assumes that the critical recent development in this process was the intellectual revival experienced in western Europe during late modernity and the enlightenment.  The other book is an intellectual history of conservative political philosophy beginning with Edmund Burke.  The author, Corey Robin, looks for the essence of conservative thought animating conservative politics.  Both books are secular, written for a secular audience.  One of these books assumes that the biblical tradition functions largely to legitimate violence of the powerful against the powerless (which, thank God, the enlightenment came to save us from), the other book assumes that the biblical tradition has been a powerful force undermining the violence of the powerful against the powerless, and has given the powerless a voice by which they might call the powerful to a transcendent moral standard.

I bring this up to highlight the fact that the Bible has been used by the powerful to justify violence AND it has been used by the powerless to protest the injustice and violence perpetrated against them by the powerful.  So what is the Bible?  Is it whatever we need it to be?  Is it a tool for the powerful?  The powerless?  If we can make of the Bible whatever we want, the what's the point?  How can the Bible legitimately be any kind of authority for us?  This is especially so given the genocidal God portrayed in its pages.  What can such a book possibly offer us enlightened moderns?  We come to the Bible with good intent, and with a belief in a loving God, the Golden Rule, and in peace, service and justice, and what do we find?

"Okay, nobody move, put your Bibles down and walk away slowly" has become, for many of us, a way of coping with this strange and frightening and dangerous book.

In the book by Corey Robin is a chapter on Supreme Court Justice Anonin Scalia, a constitutional scholar who leads the originalist camp of constitutional legal theory.  Constitutional originalism believes that the constitution must be followed according to its original intent.  For example, if the public in the 1790s understood flogging to be outside the category of cruel and unusual punishment, then the cruel and unusual punishment clause of the constitution does not prohibit flogging today.

Legal scholars who are not originalist also hold the constitution in high esteem, and have no interest in throwing it out, even though its meaning  was understood differently when it was written than we might understand it now.  The constitution functions as a high authority, but how can we possibly apply this old document of floggers and slaveholders to our times today?

One of the ways to think of this legal challenge is to look at principles and extrapolate trajectories.  What is the principle involved, for example in the cruel and unusual punishment clause, and what kind of trajectory emerges from the late nineteenth century?  If we fully extrapolate this principle from the late nineteenth century to our own times, we can and do say (at least those who are not originalists) that flogging is a form of punishment that violates the constitution.  The founders were on the right road, in other words, they just needed to go further along.  Somebody reading the constitution, then, in 1800, comes to precisely the opposite conclusion some of us might today, each holding the document to be a normative legal authority.  This hermeneutical (interpretive) task of extrapolation is complicated and difficult work, but is necessary if the constitution is to remain a living legal document.

The task of interpreting the constitution is not so different from the task of interpreting the Bible, although the latter is more complicated in that is a jumble of authors and genres, written over hundreds of years, thousands of years ago among cultures long gone.  But, for these reasons, the Bible is also way more fun and exciting than the constitution.

The other challenge in biblical hermeneutics relative to constitutional scholarship is epistemology.  The source of constitutional authority is clear, and on what basis we define it as truth.  But how do we experience the Bible as an authoritative document in our lives?  On what basis do we say it is true?  These are questions of epistemology.  How do we know something is true?  In particular, how do we know what the Bible says is true?

Let's take a look at one of the most difficult sets of passages in all of scripture, the practice of the ban during the Israelite conquest Canaan.  The ban refers to God's specific instructions to kill every man, woman or child, in the Canaanite city-states being conquered.  We are rightly horrified by this, and my natural impulse is to forswear anything to do with God, or this book as an authoritative document.  But people looking on in the biblical times would not have been horrified by this, in the same way that the founders could not conceive of flogging as cruel and unusual punishment.  The sort of behavior in which the Israelites engaged was normal for their time.  The violence in these texts is quite unremarkable for literature of the time; indeed, its depiction is rather tame.  Genocidal violence forms a kind of literary baseline out of which we can identify what is remarkable in these passages, and begin to identify a trajectory which moves into and speaks to our own times.

One remarkable aspect of these stories is the severe prohibition against plunder.  This ought to catch our attention.  Why was it so necessary to burn the possessions of the victims of these massacres?  The Israelites had spent forty years wandering the wilderness dependent on God's abundance for provision.  The impulse to plunder was an impulse to self reliance rather than God reliance.  The Israelites had left bondage in a society dedicated to acquisition, acquiring, reaping, gathering, storing in barns (Matthew 6 in case you aren't getting the reference), where some had over abundance and others not enough.  The prohibition against plunder was a reminder of the kind of people the Israelites were to be as God's people.

Another remarkable aspect of these passages, of course, is the minor role the Israelites themselves play in the conquest stories.  They do not conquer because of superior technology, larger armies, or mighty royal leadership, but through the power of God.  Again, a reminder that they are led directly by God, with no human regent, and leadership functioning with little human institutional authority.

Another remarkable aspect of these passages is that the Israelites are not to occupy these cities.  This is interesting for several reasons.  One is the innate biblical antipathy toward civilization, and the human hierarchies that inevitably arise and circumvent God's purpose for creations, namely that God's gifts be used to sustain all life in abundance, not just a privileged few.  Another interesting aspect of this is that the Israelites were being given freedom by God to be God's people, not authority to dominate a conquered people.

Remember by remarkable we mean unique relative to the literature contemporary to this period in Israelite history.  We begin to grasp how God might be at work among these people and through this book (epistemology), and are now prepared to do the work of hermeneutics.  How does the trajectory emerging from this baseline move into our own times.

So begins the biblical trajectory.  I am grateful to Mary Shertz and Perry Yoder, my professors at AMBS who introduced me to the concept of the biblical trajectory, which sustains me in my relationship with the mysterious book we call the Bible.