Paul on the Cross, take 2

I've just finished David Brondos' Paul on the Cross. I have to say I'm really enamored with it right now. I think I conveyed a generally positive attitude about it in my previous post, but right now I feel like I sold it short.

The tagline on the back cover says "Drawing the theological consequences of current scholarship on Paul". I'm pretty sure that sells it short too.

Admittedly, I have only limited knowledge of the New Perspective on Paul, but I'm pretty sure Brondos' work goes beyond of the typical edges of even the New Perspective, though he's definitely in that tradition.

My impression is that the New Perspective scholars have, for the most part, tried to keep one foot in the traditional church and keep the New Perspective in touch with and to some extent compatible with traditional doctrine, even as it points out the fallacies that led to the formulation of the traditional doctrine. Brondos, near as I can tell, harbors no such sacred cows.

And that's what I think is such a remarkable achievement in this book. Although he is certainly building on the substantial groundwork of the New Perspective, he has managed to produce a fresh reading of Paul's writings, disentangling himself from all of the traditional meanings that have been attached to the key terms and phrases in Paul and reimagining Paul's meanings in terms of the story he thinks Paul is telling. It's a breath-taking accomplishment.

Brondos says that the early Christian story of redemption, envisioned as a fulfillment of the general Jewish story of redemption of the time, was this: Israel was awaiting a Messiah who would vindicate them and their God and bring about a new age of peace and general well-being. Israel's God, being all powerful, could make this happen at will. There were no obstacles preventing God from accomplishing this redemption (no required sacrfice, no justice to be meted out). It was strictly at the will of God. However, God was seen as waiting for something. Typically, the idea was that God was waiting for the people of Israel to be living out the Torah. Enter Jesus. Jesus is God's promised Messiah, and he has come not because the Torah is being fulfilled but in order to gather to himself a community whom he will teach to keep the Torah, according to the spirit rather than according to the letter. Jesus' way of acting and committing himself entirely to fulfilling the will of God brings him into inevitable conflict with the authorities, but Jesus chooses obedience over safety. God raises Jesus from the dead as a sign and seal of approval on Jesus' mission. Finally, God pours out the Holy Spirit upon the community to enable them to live out Jesus' teachings.

That may not be exactly the traditional interpretation of Jesus' life, but I don't think anything there is particularly novel there. A lot of scholars see it that way, I think. But it doesn't seem to fit the traditional interpretation of Paul where Paul's thought is broken (even in the New Perspective) into the two categories of sacrificial/cultic language, where Jesus died for our sins, and participatory language, where we find salvation by being "in Christ," neither of which map to the story above. What's remarkable about Brondos' book is the way he uses the early Christian story of redemption outlined above and works it into both the sacrificial language and the participatory language in Paul.

Jesus died for us in that he was willing to give his life in obedience to the work that he had to do as teacher of the Torah and gatherer of the community whom he would make righteous. We are "in Christ" when we also commit to obedience, following the teaching that Christ has given us and living as he lived. You're probably not buying this without hearing a serious explanation of an awful lot of individual texts. Read the book! He may not be exactly right, but I think he's definitely on to something.

I'm actually very anxious to re-read this book very soon, which I hardly ever do. I would be going back into it again right away to try to absorb the ideas more fully except I've committed to teaching a class on the fulfillment texts in Matthew during Advent and I need to get me attention focused on that. Expect me to return to this in January.

Union with God

In my previous post I mentioned some ideas on union with God that I found a while ago in Lawrence Kushner's book God Was in This Place & I, i Did Not Know. I went back and re-read this section in Kushner's book. It's very good stuff.

The rabbi he references is Kabbalah expert Moshe Idel and the Hebrew term Idel uses to describe the mystical union is devekut. He gives three types of union: cognitive devekut, devekut of behavior and devekut of prayer. Kushner summarizes this way:

We don't want just to read about what God wants. We don't want someone else telling us what God wants either. We don't even want God telling us what God wants. We want our eyes to be God's eyes so we can see the world the way God sees it. We want our teaching to be God's Torah. We want our hands to do God's work. We want our prayers to be God's prayers. We want what God wants. Devekut: being one with God. At last the "little i, Anochi," and the "Great I, Anochi, of All creation" are one.

That's not too much to ask, is it?

It reminded me of what St. Augustine said of his conversion experience: "This was the sum of it: not to will what I willed and to will what you willed." (Confessions, Book 9, Chapter 1)

Praise God

I confess, I have a bit of a problem with praising God in prayer. Not that I don't think it's right, for it is indeed right and salutary that we should at all times and in all places offer thanksgiving and praise. But what I mean can be seen by my use of a traditional quotation in the previous sentence. Namely, it just doesn't come naturally to me to speak this way.

When I try to say a prayer of praise, it comes out sounding like the prayer from Monty Python's Meaning of Life:

O Lord, you are so big...so absolutely huge. We're all really impressed down here I can tell you. Forgive us, O Lord, for this, our dreadful toadying and barefaced flattery.

And, while I'm at it, contemporary praise songs like "Our God is an Awesome God" sound like that to me too. I'm forced to rule it out, based on prayer advice I've heard attributed to Martin Luther: "Don't lie when you pray."

That is, I'm not going to pray "O Lord, you are so big..." if that's not what's on my heart.

But something occurred to me recently that put me at ease about this, which I'd like to share with you. Some time ago, I was exposed to a sermon series on Gary Chapman's book, The Five Love Languages. At the time, I was appalled to be attending a church that would do such a heinous thing, but now, unexpectedly, a seed from that time has come to bloom. Chapman's idea is that different people express love in different ways, and if we want good relationships we need to learn to recognize each other's love languages. Some people show love verbally, others physically, others by service, and so on.

The thing that occurred to me this week is that if people can learn to recognize and respect each other's love languages, surely God will do at least that. Words of praise just aren't my love language, and they aren't likely to become so. But God knows not just what's in my heart but what my various actions mean.

I once heard an interview with the arch-heretic John Domminic Crossan. Asked if he prays, Crossan said that he doesn't understand the difference between prayer and study. For him, when he studies that is prayer. I was shocked to realize that I knew exactly what he meant. While I'm not so bold as Crossan to give up traditional forms of prayer, I think I could say, and this may scandalize both prayer-oriented spiritualists and service-oriented spiritualists, that study is the primary medium by which I experience God's presence.

Lawrence Kushner, in his book God Was In This Place and I, i Did Not Know tells of a revered Rabbi who taught that there are three ways to union with God: prayer, service and intellect. This maps directly, I think, to the three Hindu margas of bhakti (devotion), karma (service) and jnana (intellect). I think it's a fine example of something Christians can learn from people of other faiths. And it came together for me this week as I reflected on how I love God.

Afterthought: To what extent do the theological virtues of faith, hope and love correspond to these three paths of intellect, prayer and service? Is the correspondance more than superficial?

Deus Ex Machina

My last two posts have drawn on insights from Rabbi Lawrence Kushner, as found in his book Eyes Remade For Wonder. I have one last tasty morsel from the good rabbi that I'd like to chew on a bit before I let him move on.

Rabbi Kushner, reflecting on the story of Joseph in Genesis 37-50, observes that the whole purpose of this story is to get the Israelites into Egypt. If the Israelites don't get to Eygpt, the new Pharoah comes to power, but there are no Hebrew slaves there for God to deliver from bondage. No Hebrew slaves, no Exodus, no Passover, no Sinai, no Torah. So it's very important that the Israelites find their way to Egypt.

With this in mind, he calls our attention to a seemingly insignificant detail in the story of Joseph. Jacob sends Joseph to Shechem to check on his brothers who are pastoring their flocks in the field. When Joseph gets to Shecham, his brothers are nowhere to be found. Genesis relates the story thus:

He came to Shechem, and a man found him wandering in the fields; the man asked him, "What are you seeking?" "I am seeking my brothers," he said; "tell me, please, where they are pasturing the flock." The man said, "They have gone away, for I heard them say, 'Let us go to Dothan.'" So Joseph went after his brothers, and found them at Dothan.
-Genesis 37:14-17

So Kushner claims if this nameless man didn't happen to run into Joseph in the fields at Shechem and pass along this very helpful information, Joseph would have gone back home, his brothers wouldn't have thrown him in the pit and sold him into slavery, etc., etc., and there'd have been no Exodus.

Now this just happens to tie in with another bit of data that's crossed my inbox recently. In a theological brief issued last week, Ted Peters addresses the absurdity of the speculation that because Judas agreed (as per the Gospel of Judas) to hand Jesus over to the authorities he is responsible for our redemption. Peters uses reductio ad absurdum, claiming that he has purchased a manuscript of the Gospel of the Chief Priests from antiquities dealers, which argues that the Atonement would not have been possible if the chief priests hadn't been willing to meet Judas' asking price and that the chief priests therefore deserve credit for our redemption. But then he says he has also acquired from antiquities dealers a manuscript of the Gospel of Jesus which claims that Jesus did and said certain things that infuriated the chief priests, causing them to be willing to meet Judas' asking price. So maybe Jesus is responsible for our salvation after all.

While Dr. Peters' treatment does make clear his point that we cannot elevate anyone other than Jesus as the focus of redemption, the event inextricably involves a web of people. And this is exactly what we should expect. God's work in the world involves people, often lots of people, and many of them doing things that they probably have no idea are parts of God's work in the world. This is the way God works.

Jesus' redemption of the world is God's greatest work, and so we are naturally against attributing any part of it to anyone but Christ himself (with the exception of those bold enough to celebrate what God worked through the fiat of a young virgin in Nazareth).

This is certainly a fitting way to think of our redemption, but it can obscure our view of just how God works in the world if we use this as our template for what to expect in rest of our experience. We're looking for a glorious angel from heaven to appear and give us some message that will put us on the divine path, and so we disregard the commonplace words of a nameless man who finds us wandering in the field.

The Greeks gave us this great concept of deus ex machina. We tend to see it as a cheap plot trick to get a desired result, but it seems to have been a large part of how the Greeks viewed the world. In The Odyssey, for instance, we are told about Athena coming to speak to Telemachus disguised as Mentor. It would be easy for us to "demythologize" this and understand that Mentor just gave Telemachus some sound advice. But Homer saw divine intervention in it.

Christianity is quite content with the fact that it does not imagine superhumans on Mount Olympus intervening in our daily lives. We don't ever suspect that some god has spoken to us disguised as someone we know. We don't have that sort of superstition. But lets hope that in the process we haven't forgotten how to see God acting in the ordinary events of the world around us.

If we are to truly catch a glimpse of God in the world today, it will almost certainly be by noticing God emerging from the machine that is Creation.

The Omnipresent Word

I concluded my previous post on awareness of God with the somewhat tongue-in-cheek observation that knowledge of God is impossible because until you become aware of God in the world you will pay no attention to sacred texts and religious ceremony and until you receive special revelation of God through Word and Sacrament you can't see God in the world.

I alluded to Xeno because just as Xeno's proof of the impossibility of motion is immediately disproven by observation, the claimed impossibility above is also disproven by experience. But it leaves open the question of just how it is the we encounter God. Again, I turn to a pair of stories from Jewish tradition as related by Rabbi Kushner.

There is a story, Kushner says, of a group of rabbis debating just what exactly the Israelites heard at Mt. Sinai. The first rabbi says that they heard the entire Torah, from Genesis to Deuteronomy. This is a solid, orthodox answer. The next rabbi said, "No, all they heard was the ten commandments." An answer much closer to the Biblical story. A third rabbi claimed that they heard only the first of the "ten words": "I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt." A fourth rabbi said that they heard only the first word of the first "word" -- "I" and the rest of the Torah was clear from that. Finally, a fifth rabbi argued that they heard only the first letter of the first word, aleph, an almost imperceptible sound, the sound of the opening of the throat as one is about to speak, and that this alone spoken by God was enough for them to understand all that was to be revealed.

The second story is related to this one. The second story seeks to resolve the question of whether what happened at Sinai was unique. According to one tradition, it happened only there, never to be repeated. According to another tradition, it is repeated constantly and what God spoke at Sinai, God is always and everywhere repeating. Kushner cites a Jewish source which resolves the question by saying both are correct. The revelation at Sinai was unique AND it is always being repeated. The resolution is that while this revelation is always and everywhere being spoken by God, it was only at Sinai that God allowed those present the clarity of mind and soul to hear the revelation. Kushner says it was as if God turned on the Dolby noise reduction for a moment to stop the usual hiss that deafens us.

These are nice stories. I like these stories.

So here is my Christian interpretation. The Word that God speaks everywhere and always is Christ. And so Kushner is right that through an awareness of the world around us we can meet God, and Barth is right that we can only come to know God through Christ.

But it is important to notice here, and I think Kushner would agree with this, that we do not learn about God by looking at the world. Instead, while looking at the world, we discover God in the world. God meets us in, with and under Creation.

Awareness of God

Rabbi Lawrence Kushner begins his book Eyes Remade for Wonder with an analysis of the story of Moses and the burning bush. Rabbi Kushner rejects the idea that the burning bush was a miracle God performed to get Moses' attention. He says you could probably buy this trick in a Manhattan joke shop -- "Bush burns but isn't consumed, amaze your friends, life of the party, $20."

Instead, Kushner suggests, the burning bush is a test to see how well Moses can pay attention. You have to watch a burning bush closely to know it isn't being consumed. So because Moses notices, God says, "To him I would speak."

The point of all this, finally, is that the first step of spirituality, according to Kushner, is becoming aware, deeply aware, of the world around us. And then, being aware, we will see God in the world. Having become aware of God's presence around us, we will at last turn to sacred texts to seek understanding.

But at this point, a lot of Christian theologians will stand up and shout, "Nein!" Only through God's self-revelation in Christ can we know God. Before Barth, we have Luther telling us, "That person does not deserve to be called a theologian who looks upon the invisible things of God as though they were clearly perceptible in those things which have actually happened." Luther here is directly relying on St. Paul's words in Romans 1:20ff where Paul says that those who sought to know God through creation became foolish and did not truly know God.

And so we must have a special revelation of God before we can know God. God must come to us in Word and Sacrament. Only then (if even then) can we rightly see God in the world.

And so we have a paradox. On the one hand, before we become aware of God's presence around us, we will have no regard for sacred texts or religious ceremonies. On the other hand, until God comes to us in Word and Sacrament, we cannot perceive God in the world.

And so, after the manner of Xeno, I conclude that knowledge of God is impossible.

A Jewish Story

I recently got my eight-year old daughter a Bible and she's been reading it from the beginning. Last night, she was in her room reading when she came across the heading of the story of the Passover. She came out and asked if she should read that part.

"Why wouldn't you?" I asked.

"Isn't it a Jewish story?" she replied.

Oy! What happened? We've talked about Passover before. I love Passover, and I've tried to convey to her my great respect for the Jewish rituals and traditions, but apparently what she got out of it was, "That's Jewish, not Christian." And then to think that maybe she shouldn't even read the story -- wow!

Of course, it was a great "teachable moment" as they say. I went to the Bible with her, put my thumb in Genesis 1 and my index finger in the middle of Acts and said, "That much of the Bible is a Jewish story." And we talked about Jesus being Jewish and the early Christians being Jewish and how really the whole Bible is Jewish and so on.

It's just a bit disturbing how natural it seems to be to put up boundaries. It's no wonder prejudice is so easily passed on from generation to generation.

Easy Answers

"In the realm of theology, shallowness is treason."
-Abraham Heschel, The Prophets

Is there a principle more consistently violated in American Christianity than this? The opposite principle seems more often to be observed -- if you can't get your theology on a bumper sticker, it's too complex.

I know there's good theology out there. It's the thing that drives my faith. I don't want answers to theological questions. I want to know God. Often people act as though that isn't the business of theology, but I can't imagine what else it's good for.

And yet, there's a certain paradox here. The most basic questions of religion must, if we are honest, remain unanswerable. Does God exist? Popular religion will answer with a quick "Yes" and probably follow it up with a simple logical proof. After all, if we can't even answer that question, our faith is surely exposed as a scam, right?

But if we invoke Heschel's principle here, "in the realm of theology, shallowness is treason," it becomes evident that we should not give a quick and easy answer to the question of God's existence. It's something we have to wrestle with. Our wrestling may presume an answer. It may seek to redefine the question. But it cannot pretend that it's an easy question.

The same is true of Christ's question, "Who do you say that I am?" The same is true of all the most basic questions of the faith: "What do we mean by salvation?" "How does the death of Christ accomplish salvation?" "What do we mean by 'heaven'?"

Easy answers are the enemy of true faith.

Thought and Touch

"Thought is like touch, comprehending by being comprehended."
-Abraham Heschel

I put this up without comment earlier in the week. I was intimidated by it and didn't know if I could do it justice with commentary. I'm still not sure that I can, but I just can't pass it by. When I first read this, it puzzled me. I had no idea what it meant, but it was short and pithy enough to get a hook in my brain, so I thought about it.

For starters, how can "touch" be described as "comprehending by being comprehended"? In what way does what I touch comprehend me? On a personal level, I can't touch someone without alerting them to my presence. Touch can't be secret. And it's two-way communication. The one who touches is simultaneously touched. In the language of Martin Buber, who like Heschel was a Hasidic Jew, touch is an inherently "I-you" sense. Even as I touch a rock, the rock touches me.

And Heschel suggests that thought is like this also. I can have no direct contact with an idea. When it enters my mind, I perceive only by allowing it to interact with my mind. It must become a part of the fabric of my thought-world.

It is now a well-recognized fact that there is no such thing as an objective observer. All of my observations are colored and shaped by my prior biases and expectations. In scientific language, the observer modifies the outcome of any experiment. What is less commonly reflected upon is that the observer is affected by the experiment.

At this point, we as hearers have some degree of choice. We are able to decide, to some degree, how much we will allow what we hear to impact us and how much we will exert our own influence on the incoming idea. The more precisely I fit an idea into my existing mental framework, the less impact it will have upon that framework. Alternatively, I can choose to receive the word, to hear it as something new. I allow the word to address me. In so doing, I comprehend by being comprehended.

Biblical Relevance

A student of philosophy who turns from the discourses of the great metaphysicians to the orations of the prophets may feel as if he were going from the realm of the sublime to the arena of trivialities. Instead of dealing with the timeless issues of being and becoming, of matter and form, of definitions and demonstrations, he is thrown into orations about widows and orphans, about the corruption of judges and affairs of the market place. Instead of showing us a way through the elegant mansions of the mind, the prophets take us to the slums.
-Abraham Heschel, The Prophets

One of the standard criticisms brought against Christianity is that it is a "pie-in-the-sky-by-and-by" religion. But curiously, one of the chief obstacles people, specifically Christians, have in developing a love for the Bible is that it lacks what I may call, for lack of a better term, spiritual profundity. It isn't awe-inspiring in the way, for example, that the Tao Te Ching or the Upanishads can be. It's too earthy.

Members of my family, knowing my love for the Bible, will occaissionally ask me to read them something they'll like, by which I take them to mean something that they'll hear and say, "Ah, yes! That's beautiful!" I invariably respond with selected bits of Romans 8 or Isaiah 40, and they are satisfied. But if they later pick up a Bible themselves looking for such inspirations, they'll quickly put it back down.

Heschel says that he turned from the study of philosophy to the study of the prophets because "philosophy had become an isolated, self-subsisting, self-indulgent, entity.... The answers offered were unrelated to the problems." Ironically, this sounds a lot like what people seem to want from the Bible. They would rather it were a book of platitudes than what it is.

I think this has to do with our cultural understandings of what a "Holy Book" should be. If God were to speak to us, it would sound like Bach's "Mass in B Minor", right? Everyone in western culture can sigh with pleasure when they hear, "he is named Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace," but we're left scratching our heads when we hear, "Therefore I am like maggots to Ephraim, and like dry rot to the house of Judah" (Hosea 5:12).

Could it be that we want a God who is a little less relevant to daily life?

God's Card

A couple of week's ago I made a couple of comments on Lawrence Kushner's book God Was in This Place and I, i Did Not Know with the suggestion that over the following days I would follow up with some other things I liked about it. I did follow up with one brief bit a couple of days later, and then nothing. So by now, you're probably saying to yourself, "Lordy b-gordy, when is the boy going to talk about Rabbi Kushner's book again?!?" (Or maybe you haven't given it any thought at all.) Well, here's a small gem I found there.

In talking about the Ten Commandments, Kushner talks about the preamble, "I am the Lord you God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery," as God's self-introduction. He playfully imagines it being like God handing the Israelites his divine calling card. In the center, it has the ineffable name of God. Just below that, in italics, it says "frees slaves" and in the lower right hand corner, in small print "Call any time."

I loved this image. I loved it so much I made an image of my own, which I hope will not offend.