The Offense of Liturgy and President Obama’s Prayer Breakfast Speech

A young woman who grew up Christian but had never attended a Reformed or Presbyterian service came with her friends to a church I served. She told me later how upsetting she found the unison prayer of confession:

“We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; and we have done those things which we ought not to have done; and there is nothing good in us.”

While the rest of us took the words for granted, they took her aback. She looked up from the worship bulletin and scanned the congregation, all of whom were praying aloud. “I couldn’t believe all these people were admitting this in front of God and everybody!”

To many of us in a liturgical Christian tradition, the attack from the Christian right on President Obama after his prayer breakfast speech last week left us baffled. Former governor of Virginia Jim Gilmore has written that President Obama’s speech was “the most offensive I’ve ever heard a president make in my lifetime.”

Further, he said that the president “offended every believing Christian in the United States.”

Here are the offending words of the president:

“Humanity has been grappling with these questions throughout human history,” he told the group, speaking of the tension between the compassionate and murderous acts religion can inspire. “And lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.” [Quoted from the Washington Post online]

Response from the Christian right ranged from “that was a long time ago,” to “the Crusades were justified,” to SBC president Russell Moore’s “The evil actions that [Obama] mentioned were clearly outside the moral parameters of Christianity itself and were met with overwhelming moral opposition from Christians.” Well, no.

Most of the offense seemed to come from the fiction that President Obama had intimated that Christianity and ISIS are morally equivalent.

While much of the hysteria can be written off as political crazy talk that naturally emerges when reactionaries hear the speech of a Muslim Atheist Kenyan Communist Black Panther Terrorist-sympathizing leader of the free world, some of it comes from a genuine difference between liturgical and non-liturgical Christianity.

Those of us in the Reformed tradition, especially those of us who are faith-descendants of John Calvin (who did not burn Michael Servetus at the stake, that’s a nasty rumor–he just approved of it after the fact) confess our sin each week in response to the words of Scripture,

“If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he who is faithful and just will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say that we have not sinned, we make God a liar, and his word is not in us.”

The universality of sin, especially idolatry, stands at the center of our worldview.

The fact that Christianity has been distorted throughout history (and continues to be distorted to justify murder, kidnapping child soldiers, and discrimination) comes as no surprise to Calvinists. Humans being what we are, we will use every force for good, whether religion or science or psychology as a tool to serve our own ends.

In the Christian tradition that does not include a regular confession of sin, such an examination of our own religion’s history could sound weak and even treasonous. Eric Erickson’s language reveals this profound difference when he writes “When we possess Christ, we possess truth.” In the non-liturgical and fundamentalist Christian tradition, Christ is a tool or even a weapon to be possessed to give us an advantage over others. Rather than a guiding light, Jesus becomes a heavy flashlight to be wielded against opponents.

When one’s own desires stand at the center of faith rather than God’s, whether one’s desire is a ticket to heaven, winning an argument, winning an election, or making more money, that religion becomes self-serving and idolatrous. The words of Jesus and the prophets (“love your neighbor as yourself,” for instance) can get hammered into the oddly-shaped space in the heart of the self-centered pilgrim, but they will not find room to take root and grow.

Self-satisfied Christianity insulates its adherents from those who believe differently. “You seem like a nice person, too bad you’re going to hell unless you believe the same thing I do” tends to put up a wall against authentic and mutual friendship with anyone devoted to a different religious tradition.

For those of us who have Muslim friends, the fact that ISIS and Al-Qaeda are misusing Islam for their own ends is self-evident. Only someone who has no close Muslim friends could believe that Islam is, at its root, more violent than Christianity and that all Muslims are potentially dangerous.

For those emotionally cut off from actual Muslim people, violence in the Koran defines the religion of Islam in a way that violence in the books of Judges and Revelation, for instance, do not define Christianity.

The president’s point, almost lost in the kickboxing match of political competition for the victim badge, seems so obvious. It is, however, no less offensive to us righteous sinners now than when Jesus first said it: “Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye?”

Inerrancy is Heresy.

Inerrancy is heresy. Here are five reasons to reject it.

In the past, I have rolled my eyes or shrugged and walked away whenever someone in a theological discussion spoke of the Bible as “the inerrant Word of God.” I have assumed that this relatively new idea (codified in the Chicago Statement of 1978) would eventually collapse from the weight of its superstitious, idolatrous, intellectually untenable and dishonest presuppositions.

No doubt, it will, eventually.

In the mean time, it leads the Church and the world astray.

While I do not advocate burning anyone at the stake, I do think it is important to wall off, take a stand against, and defeat destructive theological ideas.
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Here are five reasons we should argue against biblical inerrancy as forcefully as possible.

1. Inerrancy is an insidious form of idolatry. In claiming that the Bible is “the inerrant Word of God,” the doctrine of inerrancy claims perfection for something we can see, feel, read, and hold in our hand. It reduces the Creator of the World to a golden calfskin book.
2. Inerrancy is intellectually untenable. It reduces faith to Mark Twain’s description of “believing what you know ain’t so.” Contradictions between different accounts of the creation, the birth of Jesus, the crucifixion, the flood, and other important biblical narratives can be easily understood and appreciated through an historical approach to the development of these stories. Insisting on their literal accuracy requires an intellectual sleight of hand that blocks off the reader from the spiritual richness of the voices of our ancestors in the faith.
3. Inerrancy is superstitious. It places belief in a magic book rather than the grand and holy Mystery to whom the Bible points.

4. Inerrancy assumes that the Holy Spirit is dead, that nothing more can be revealed, that no ethical, moral, or theological progress has been made since the last word of Scripture was written around the end of the first century or beginning of the second. The doctrine of biblical inerrancy leads the non-believing public to assume that biblical inerrancy is a central tenet of the Christian faith, and that being a Christian means being against the equal rights of LGBT people, against women’s autonomy, and looking to the Bible for literal and accurate information about science and history. A century and a half ago, those who held to the precursor of inerrancy, biblical infallibility, led some Christians to use the Bible to justify slavery. While I would not argue that the American Civil War was a religious war, I can argue that the Bible became a weapon in the hands of those who waged an economic war and appealed to biblical infallibility in the verse “Slaves, obey your earthly masters.” (Ephesians 6:5 and Colossians 3:22.)
5. The quest for certainty shuts down the gift of human creativity. The appeal to the inerrancy of the biblical text reflects a need to achieve certainty about great mysteries that can never be fully known. Describing the text as sacred, holy, unique, and Spirit-breathed recognizes the deep mystery historical and contextual reading of the Bible leads us to explore and engage. It opens us up to deep understanding of the witness of our ancestors in the faith as we continue to seek the Spirit in our own lives. Claiming inerrancy or infallibility places a worldly standard on the text that it does not claim for itself. It shuts off the creative human spirit, the unique gift that has led to ethics, moral vision, and art.

To be clear, I am not arguing against the authority of Scripture in the life of Jews and Christians. I am arguing in favor of it.

I am arguing that the doctrine of biblical inerrancy has distorted the Christian faith, fed the delusions of violent mental illness, provided a (false) theological foundation for terrorists to bully, enslave, and kill in the name of God, and distracted the Church from its mission of loving God, loving our neighbors, proclaiming the Good News in word and deed, and making disciples.

For All the Saints, Martyrs, and Liars

If you are preaching or listening to a sermon this Sunday from the All Saints Day lectionary, you may encounter 1 John 3:1-7. It’s a strange paragraph, pulling us back and forth between the assurance that we are children of God to the warning not to be deceived about lawlessness. My article today addresses the context of 1 John as a whole rather than a verse-by-verse analysis, but I thought you all might find it helpful.

My thinking about the whole New Testament has been greatly influenced by Amy Jill Levine’s The Misunderstood Jew and, of course, Rabbi Edwin Friedman’s Generation to Generation. Though neither of them address this particular passage, they address the larger issues. Levine reminds us of the Jewish origin of the New Testament and Friedman writes of emotional reactivity and family cut-off as if he were addressing the situation of first century members of the Christian community as their relationship to the synagogue disintegrated.

When we remember that the dividing line between Christian and Jew did not exist in the first century the way it does now as a religious and ethnic designation, it influences the way we read all of the New Testament. In the first century, Christians were a subset of Jews. Even those Gentiles who joined the first century church saw themselves as becoming Jews. The whole circumcision controversy would not have arisen if the church did not think of itself as a Jewish institution. It wasn’t until the second century (decades after the writing of 1 John) that Christians embraced an identity separate from Judaism.

The community of John (I’m convinced that the Johannine pastoral letters and the Gospel grew out of the same community) thought of themselves as Jews who believed Jesus was the Jewish messiah. The expression John uses in the gospels that is translated “the Jews” refers to some group of Jewish leaders, not the whole ethnic group or all the members of the synagogue. It’s probably more complicated than that, but the main thing to remember is that Jesus and all his disciples and almost everyone mentioned in the Gospel according to John were Jews except for the Samaritan woman at the well and her friends in chapter 4. So, whoever it is John refers to when he uses that Greek expression “hoi judaioi,” (translated “the Jews” in the NRSV) it’s clear that he uses it in a very different context than our own. We use it to distinguish between Jew and Gentile. He uses it to distinguish between one group of Jewish people and another.

The next thing to remember is how emotionally devastating it was for them to be cut off by their synagogue and many family members. (Emotional cut-off is the essence of the word translated “hate.”) It was so devastating that many members of the Christian community left to return to their families and the synagogue, renouncing their claim that Jesus was raised from the dead because they were unable to withstand the emotional pressure of the cut-off. (Here’s a bit of polemic John uses against them in 1 John 2:18, “many antichrists have come. From this we know that it is the last hour. They went out from us, but they did not belong to us; for if they had belonged to us, they would have remained with us.”)

The claim that Jesus is the Messiah, and that his resurrection is the evidence, is the central claim of the Christian community and the claim that the leaders of the synagogue would not allow people to teach in the synagogue. It was, they said, a lie, and those who proclaimed it were liars. John joins in the name-calling. He turns this claim around with his polemic against “liars” who say they have not sinned and “liars” who say they love God but hate (cut off) a member of their own family or community. While we ordinarily read his proclamation that “God is love” (4:8) as a gentle description of our Creator, it is, in context, part of a screed against those whom John feels have betrayed him and his community by cutting them off or leaving to return to the synagogue.

Another issue the letter addresses is the accusation from some synagogue leaders that Christians were libertines. The fine line John walks between those who say they have not sinned, whom he calls “liars,” and those who abide in Jesus and therefore do not sin (3:6) makes sense only as part of that larger controversy between Christian Jews and synagogue leaders over the definition of sin. To the synagogue leaders, sin was breaking the commandments, but to John it was breaking this one commandment with two parts, “that we should believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ and love one another just as he has commanded us.” (3:23)

The letter of 1 John, then, sends encouragement to a community of disciples of Jesus who had been cut off from (hated by) their families and their synagogue. John tells them that they are the truly faithful ones, that those who hate them (cut them off) are the liars and the sinners, and that the only way to stem the hemorrhaging of members is by loving one another as brothers and sisters.

Here’s my own reflection on this. The Johannine correspondence records for us John’s struggle to make theological sense out of the rejection of Jesus and his resurrection by the leaders of the synagogue and the tearing apart of family and community relationships. His polemical tone, using labels such as “liars” and “antichrists” indicates that the emotional reactivity had reached such intensity that those Jews on opposite sides of the resurrection claim could no longer hear each other. This emotionally charged letter records a sad failure of the church and synagogue to maintain their relationship in the face of disagreement. Certainly, the synagogue had withstood disagreements before, but this one led to the tearing apart of families and communities, and that’s hard to make sense of in the context of a loving God who calls us to love one another. Often, John presents his explanation in terms that fan the flames of division: God loves us because we love Jesus, but those who don’t love Jesus are liars who only say they love God, but they really hate God because they hate us, their brothers and sisters. While John’s rhetoric soars in places, he is at his worst when he claims the victim badge for himself and his community.

The question for us I think is this: To what extent has this emotional process of cut-off, victim-thinking, and name-calling of our adversaries repeated itself within the church? To what extent was it replicated in the Reformation? What would happen if we refused to engage in the cut-off, victim-thinking, and name-calling? What if we could embrace John’s soaring rhetoric on love without using it as a weapon against our adversaries? What if we never tired of reaching across theological, denominational, and ethnic boundaries in love? What would it look like to reach across to our Jewish brothers and sisters? Our Muslim brothers and sisters? Our Roman Catholic and Orthodox and Protestant fellow Christians? What if we simply rejected the divisions that evolved from the emotional process of the first century Christians’ failure to negotiate a peaceful coexistence with, or amicable divorce from, the synagogue?

On a more positive note, the Johannine community clearly survived because they took up John’s challenge to love one another as brothers and sisters. They provided one another with the love and strength it takes to withstand the rejection of their own families. What would it look like for us to provide one another with such love to withstand every rejection of the world outside (or other churches) while still reaching beyond our boundaries to those outside our own community?

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Five Things Many Mainline Christians Believe about the Bible that their Pastors Don’t

Throughout 30 years of ministry, I have seen little change in the gap between the beliefs of seminary-educated clergy and our parishioners. While a very small minority of people make it through a Masters degree program at an accredited mainline seminary still clinging to the fundamentalist approach of numbers 1-4 below, and fewer than half number 5, I continue to hear many parishioners in mainline churches assume that all 5 are orthodoxy.

  1. Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible.

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    Leningrad Codex, thought to be the oldest existing Hebrew text of the Bible.
  2. Paul wrote all the books with his name on them.
  3. Revelation was written to predict the future.
  4. The Gospels quote Jesus accurately.
  5. The Bible condemns homosexuality.
  1. Clergy who paid attention during their Old Testament class know that the expression the “Book of Moses” refers to 5 books written about Moses, not by Moses. They arose over generations of oral composers who were edited during and shortly after the Babylonian exile, many centuries after Moses died.

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Three Ways to Know When Someone has Weaponized Scripture

September 1, 2014 Article

If you were Satan and you wanted to damn the world to hell, wouldn’t this be a great place to start, getting parents to reject their children?

I listened with sadness to this video of parents using religion as a weapon against their son as he came out to them as gay. Weaponizing Scripture saddens me for this young man and all who have been abused by Bible-wielding parents or preachers.

As a minister, I also find it sad in the same way that a chef would weep to see a beautiful meal used in a food fight.

This resource that can nourish community and family relationships has been slopped around as a crude weapon; a tool for healing has been used for physical and emotional violence. A source of ancient wisdom about God, in the hands of fools, has been turned into a weapon for evil.

And make no mistake, rejecting one’s own child because of his sexual orientation is an evil action. It’s not just “being in disagreement” or “raised in a different generation.” It is a choice.

Rejecting one’s child is not something anyone was born to do. It is a lifestyle choice.

If you were Satan and you wanted to damn the world to hell, Continue reading