I’m warming myself up to revisit a post from 15 (!) years ago (!!). (Then, as soon-to-be, an Easter Sunday thing.) So I’m going to start with this comment as a springboard:
Strangely, I keep going back to the gospels with more interest (trying to improve my Greek and trying to pick up enough Aramaic to get through the Peshitta over the next decade), but the various "quests" to explain what really happened now leave me cold and uninterested.Now, Rick is my grate gud friend from ancient of days (more ancient by the day. I’m still in touch with four people who are not family who I’ve known longer than my wife, and I’ve known her for over 50 years.), and I’m not starting an internet row with him. I sympathize with him, even as I maintain my regard for Bultmann and Crossan and my seminary professors. Which takes me to my first story.
For that reason I suppose I should thank my lucky stars I'm not a clergyman feeling like he has to somehow mediate all those scientific findings on the gospels to his charges to avoid being thought magical.
As it happens, I was reading from Meister Eckhart's outrageous, unimaginable commentary on Genesis from the first of the Classics of Western Spirituality series this morning on the bus, and I found him so much more compelling than our dour contemporary exegetes I had to wonder if I was just in terminal revolt against the reductionism and implicit cynicism of this age.
Seminary stripped away a lot of assumptions from me. I still carry the sense of crossing I line I couldn’t uncross (akin to marriage; you may divorce, but you never uncross the line of marriage as if it never happened), or becoming a parent (same explanation) up reading and then understanding Kristen Stendhal’s Paul Among Jews And Gentiles. All my friends in seminary agreed that, once we understood Stendahl’s thesis, there was no going back to our old way of thinking. We’d stepped through a door, and it was closed behind us forever.
A minor object lesson in what seminary was like, and how much we all faithfully struggled to learn but not to get lost. Our thoughts were not our professors’ thoughts, and they didn’t want them to be. Well, mostly they didn’t.
I got into an intellectual row with a professor who couldn’t let my theological positions go. The year I took systematics (and I am NOT a systematic theologian. It was a school of thought as wrong-headed as Russell’s logical positivism. And now as dead; or should be), we didn’t have a systematics professor, so three professors taught the class and reviewed our papers. They told me they treated mine as a draft dissertation. I’m not bragging, that was 30 years ago and it never so much as bought me a cup of coffee. If anything, it shows I peaked uselessly and almost silently, long, long ago. But that set me in conflict with one of the three professors.
He was a disciple of Stuart Ogden and process theology (which had the half life of the “death of God” theological movement, with none of the notoriety. I read two of Ogden’s books in seminary. Don’t remember a thing about them.). He was trained as a chemist, so he brought an empiricist’s eye to everything theological. I didn’t, but that didn’t mean I knew better. It just meant I disagreed.
He was sure he knew better, and bluntly told me so. He wouldn’t even agree to disagree, and we had to fight over the issue. When I left, we were still fighting.
So it goes.
My point is, I don’t care to convince people to agree with me. Persuade? Sure; I have that much ego. Mostly, though, I prefer to make people think for themselves. I was also, then as now, critically aware of my own thinking, and concerned that I wasn’t holding on to some pre-Stendahl (so to speak) ideas I couldn’t bear to examine critically, for fear I might lose them. I tried to listen to my professor’s critiques; but I also examined them. I didn’t want to say: “He’s the professor, he’s right.” But I didn’t want to say “What does he know?,” either.
I left seminary when they were through with me, and I tried to present a post-Stendahl Jesus (let’s call it) to my churches. This was not unlike being a lawyer after law school, and trying to explain to clients that the law wasn’t as simple as making up a solution to their problems, or just finding one ready made in the “law books.” Oh, and, your understanding of the law, Mr. Client, is as ignorant as the jawbone of an ass.
Granted, the law works within enforceable confines, and religion doesn’t (gone are those days). But congregations do like to engage in magical thinking, and put Jesus (and do God) in a mythical past, safely wrapped in cotton so He cannot be broken and only taken out in special occasions to be admired; before putting Him back into the box.
Placing Jesus concretely in 1st century Palestine can be a way of placing Jesus concretely in 21st century America. Or so I thought. I wanted to make Jesus real to the engineer and the architect and the business people. Starting there, maybe they could recognize Jesus (and so God; we’re still not that good at this doctrine of the Trinity) as here and now, not Then and Gone.
Much as I admire Eckhart and the mystics (Julian of Norwich, Teresa, the “Cloud of Unknowing”), it doesn’t preach near as well as Jesus the human in Nazareth.
Although I agree a lot of the scholarship of the Jesus Seminar was so bluntly aimed at American fundamentalism it had a short reach and shorter shelf life. Still, it made me the man I am today. An old, retired grump who airs his complaints on the internet. 🛜
So it goes.
N.B.: I don’t disagree with Rick’s comment, and I am certainly Protestant enough to allow everyone their own way to God (I consider that an RC tenet as well. A church that embraces Aquinas and Augustine and Francis and Loyola, or just the mystics, is a church no more hellbent on drawing narrow boundaries than many Protestant sects are. It happens, but it really violates the spirit of Protestantism, or “catholic.”) Let the reader understand.
And that’s the question of schools of biblical criticism. How does the reader understand? Historical criticism has its values, and its limitations. So does formal; and textual; even the various schools of literary criticism (that professor I mentioned despised biblical literary criticism. I was trained in literary criticism; he was trained in chemistry. No surprise we disagreed on that.) I don’t want any one of them to become an obstacle to understanding; I want them to aid understanding. After all, the authors of the Hebrew and Christian scriptures did not think exactly like us. They had presumptions about the nature of God and humanity and society we simply don’t share. Paul’s “house churches,” for example, are what we would call an “extended family.” Multiple generations, and servants, under one roof. A mutual friend of ours owned a “shotgun camelback” row house as his first house, in a city with more urban history than most in Texas. It had three rooms downstairs in a line (the “shotgun”) and a bedroom upstairs on the back (the “camelback”). He told me that earlier in the last century, as many as three generations of a family lived in that house. Not unlike, IOW, the housing situation common to the Empire. We imagine Paul talking to middle class businessmen, and probably miss the reference to Lydia, “a dealer in purple cloth,” in Acts. But purple cloth was reserved for royalty. Again, we don’t have a category like that anymore. Nor do we really understand a world where 95 to 99% of the wealth was held by less than 1% of the people. When Jesus said “Makarioi hoi ptochoi,” he meant people who didn’t have a shopping cart to push under an overpass. And there were a lot more of them than there are now. At least in our “empire.”
I think if you want to understand what Jesus said, you have to understand who he was talking to.
I’m interested, in other words, in scraping the varnish off Jesus, the better to be confronted by him. I agree with Erasmus, but I agree with Leonard Cohen: “There are cracks, cracks in everything. That’s how the light gets in.” (Which I may be misquoting. I’m too lazy to Google.) I also agree with Jackson Browne, singing about Christmas and the Rebel Jesus; “I have no wish to come between this day and your enjoyment.” You can read that as anyone’s preference for the Christ, not just Xmas day. But I do want people to be confronted by Jesus because, as Paul said, Jesus is an offense. Also because reading scripture is an interpretation; it cannot be otherwise. What you assume I shall as good assume is fine poetry; but it’s terrible exegetical advice.
I wouldn’t have you assume any one school of criticism, even that of the Church Fathers, is fair or foul. I would just challenge you not to rest too comfortably on your assumptions. IMHTheologicalO, anyway, that’s very in line with the Rebel Jesus.
Let's have a row! (Down the Rio Grande maybe?)
ReplyDeleteNaturally I went back and read my old comment and noted how charitably you didn't include my breezy dismissal of the historical-critical school. It was at one time very important to me for providing a counter to the superstitious fundamentalism that both of us grew up around. That was no small thing, but for me it was entirely negative.
I of course can't competently comment on your post because I haven't read Kristen Stendhal. But, this being the net, I'll try not to let that stop me.
For me, even as one who went from Presbyterian to Catholic some 40 years ago, the scriptures themselves remain paramount. They remain an anchor for all the nuttiness that infects every species of Christianity today. So first I try to read them, carefully and with appreciation, in Hebrew and Greek, both of which I'm trying to improve in retirement. (and no, I never did get to the Aramaic Peshitta, which still glares down at me from the shelf).
I try to balance that with some familiarity with the tradition, and currently am knocking around in Origen, Eckhart and Barth, all of whom are pretty free in their exegesis, but whose hearts seem to me to be in the right place. The tradition is as important as the source, but it has to be grounded in it as well.
Example: it is quite painful to be reading the news coming out of Israel. Politically I have moved from a great supporter of the State of Israel to a doubter of the whole project, because it seems to me that what can be called "Jewish Nationalism" suffers from all the terrible flaws of "Christian Nationalism." I know that that's an extreme simplification, But for me, reading the ancient stories of, say, Jacob, or Samuel, have a concreteness and painful honesty that provides more a critique than support for the re-established Jewish state.
I mention this with the full realization that the creation of the Jewish State was partly the work of Christians whose Christendom provided the tragic model, and the full realization that Catholicism was, for ages, most most established-by-law of them all. Which is to say, I am excruciatingly aware that I couldn't have become a Catholic, or remain one, in the absence of Vatican II's fundamental about-face on questions of ecumenicism, religious freedom, and non-Christian religions.
Which is perhaps going too far off topic. But it is in the scripture that Jesus says, "My kingdom is not of this world." It is in the Christian tradition that Origen reads Joshua, not as a literal invasion and conquest to be emulated, but as an allegory of self-mastery (Gandhi read the Baghavad Gita the same way).
So I certainly agree with you that these ancient writings shine a dire light on 21st century America and 21st century Christianity. But that judgment rests less on the question of historicity as on the infinitely more important issue of meaning. With my old buddy Erasmus I am convinced that most anyone can understand the message of the gospels. But it takes "a broken and a contrite heart."