A Great Hill to Die On

Now for unChristian's chapter on Homosexuality.

This passage encapsulates Kinnaman and Lyons's approach, not just to homosexuality but to Christian/"outsider" interaction and perception in general.

In our research, the perception that Christians are “against” gays and lesbians—not only objecting to their lifestyles but also harboring irrational fear and unmerited scorn toward them—has reached critical mass. The gay issue has become the “big one,” the negative image most likely to be intertwined with Christianity’s reputation. It is also the dimension that most clearly demonstrates the unChristian faith to young people today, surfacing a spate of negative perceptions: judgmental, bigoted, sheltered, right-wingers, hypocritical, insincere, and uncaring. Outsiders say our hostility toward gays—not just opposition to homosexual politics and behaviors but disdain for gay individuals—has become virtually synonymous with the Christian faith.

Let me begin by assuring the reader that unlike more extreme atheists, I do not hate Christians; I object to their lifestyles but do not harbor irrational fear and unmerited scorn toward them.  I know and love many Christians, some of whom I assume are good people.  I don't disdain them, I only oppose Christian politics and behaviors, and would like to help them, if I can.  That includes David Kinnaman and Gabe Lyons, whose painful struggle with Christianity is evident on every page of unChristian.  David and Gabe, it's not you, it's your lifestyle.  You can change.

Of course I don't believe that Kinnaman and Lyons would feel warmed by my welcoming words, though I mean them sincerely.  I imagine they'd feel patronized, and recognize that my insistence on my love and concern for them is only meant to distract attention from my principled rejection of Christianity.  My acceptance of them doesn't mean I accept their faith.  In the same way, it's not their surface conduct toward gay people that I, and I presume the young Christians and ex-Christians they surveyed, reject: it's their teachings about homosexuality.  (And about many other issues as well, but they're not my subject here.)

I'm not surprised that many of the young Christians Kinnaman interviewed put their objections to conservative evangelical Christianity in terms of hate and hostility, or in terms of opposition to gays and lesbians.  As Kinnaman admits, hatred and hostility have been hard to miss in Christian antigay campaigns.

Here is an example: one seventeen-year-old churchgoer described her experience bringing a gay friend to church. “The youth pastor knew I was going to bring him, and even though his talk really had nothing to do with homosexuality, he still found a way to insert ‘God created Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve’ into his comments. I was sitting there, just dying. This happened more than once. My friend was at a point where he was interested in seeing what Jesus might offer, and the door was just slammed shut” [102].

It will be an uphill struggle for Christians like Kinnaman who profess goodwill toward us to convince us that they really do mean well.  I suggest that merely professing their good intentions and biting back the "Adam and Steve" jokes is not going to be enough; at the very least they're going to have to put more pressure on their leaders and peers to change their attitudes.  Lots of luck with that.

People do have a tendency to confuse opposition to someone's actions with opposition to the person him or herself, which presumably is why so many people told Kinnaman that Christians are "against" gay men and lesbians.  Kinnaman himself slips up on page 103: "Because of our opposition to homosexuals, outsiders cannot picture the church as the loving community of believers Jesus envisioned."  Much if not most of the time, the distinction is made dishonestly, because in practice the distinction doesn't matter.  I suppose there are a few heterosexual "unChristians" with LGBT friends or relatives who'd be reassured by Kinnaman's moderate tone, for a while at least, in some cases long enough to drift back into the churches they'd previously rejected.  I doubt that many gay people or many straight friends and relatives will fall for it.

It's difficult to figure out exactly what Kinnaman and Lyons think the place of LGBT people in their church should be.  For one thing, they and the commentators to whom they give space in unChristian tend to focus less on us than on themselves.  For example, the writer Sarah Raymond Cunningham, who informs us that "I have braved a few real-life conversations with homosexual friends" (113):

There were dozens of tangible traits I cherished about my friend, and I told him so. But—in a voice trembling with nervousness and compassion—I confessed I was afraid my friendship might seem insincere if I couldn’t affirm what he held to be a central part of his identity: his sexuality.

“As far as I can tell,” I gulped, “the Bible only introduces one kind of sexual union, and that is between a man and a woman. So, I have to believe this is the course that leads to the fullest life—the life the Creator intended for us.”

When I spit out these defining sentences, I worried all my friend could hear was Blah-Blah-Christian-Blah-Blah.  But he stared back at me kindly, so I continued...

I think the conversation changed me more than my friend, because it forced me to acknowledge parts of God’s will I sometimes overlooked. To accept that God doesn’t want me to do things even he does not choose to do—to control or hijack someone else’s freedom [113, 114].

It's as if what matters most is her, not her friend.  Given that "he stared back at me kindly," it sounds as if he was counseling her, not the other way around.  Perhaps that's how it was, and should have been.

I've run into my share of people like Cunningham, and I try to reassure them that I don't mind much if they can't "affirm" my homosexuality.  It's not really their business anyway.  But if they keep trying to negate it, if they can't let it fade into the background and attend to other traits or interests that we do have in common, we can't be friends.  That's only a problem if they see me not as a person, but as a notch on their missionary bedposts.  But if they do, and if they can accept that I don't affirm what they hold to be a central part of their identity -- their Christianity -- friendship is possible. 

Or consider Rick McKinley, pastor of Imago Dei Church in Portland:

Recently, I spent a year with a guy who thought he was born gay. We spent time working through what I believed to be God’s design for him. I believe God’s design is clearly male/female union or heterosexuality, however, he concluded that God made him that way (homosexual) and wanted to embrace this lifestyle fully. Therefore, he left the church, but it was a healthy parting. I am not sure how you avoid this kind of messiness when building relationships and loving people who are struggling with sexual identification issues [116].

Here too the gay man fades into the background.  It's all about the "healthy parting" and the kinds of "messiness" a pastor has to deal with.

Third one's the charm.  Chris Seay, of Ecclesia in Montrose, Houston:

As I walked closer to the place where our church was positioned, I realized there were three transvestite prostitutes working on the street corner. I decided to strike up a conversation with them, which led to me going inside and bringing them water. They were thirsty, so I gave them something to drink [114].

That's the whole story.  I suppose I should be glad he didn't tell us that the three transvestite prostitutes were so moved by Seay's Christian charity that they joined his church and in a few short months had become linebackers for the Houston Texans; but as it is, they are just props in a story about himself, his compassion, his courage in going near three homosexuals, braving the peril of homosexual cooties. Just like Jesus. 

Throughout unChristian the writers and commentators give the impression that homosexuals are something Out There, a kind of person they've never met before.  (The chapter following "Homosexuality" is "Sheltered," but I think that's the wrong word; "Closed Off" or "Hermetically Sealed" would be more like it.) You'd think the book had been written in the early 1970s, not the first decade of the twenty-first century.  "Despite widespread mobilization over the last decade, most Christians have become even more isolated from homosexuals," Kinnaman declares on page 106.  It may be true of the circles Kinnaman and Lyons and their commentators move in, but as Kinnaman admits,

Our research shows that one-third of gays and lesbians attend church regularly, going to churches across a wide spectrum of denominations and backgrounds, including Catholic, mainline, nonmainline, and nondenominational churches. Most gays and lesbians in America align themselves with Christianity, and one-sixth have beliefs that qualify them as born-again Christians. Most have been active in a church at one time, such as this gay man: “Sometimes it’s hard for me to reconcile the ‘Christian movement’ I see in politics today with the kind, generous people I knew from my own days in the church. I remember the Christians I knew (and once considered myself) to be students of God, who wanted to serve him and spread his good news and message of hope to a needy world.” The bottom line: some gays are antagonistic to Christianity, but many are not [97].

It appears to me that Kinnaman is being disingenuous here, equivocating in a typically conservative-evangelical way.  He'd like the reader to suppose that the gays and lesbians in America [who] align themselves with Christianity" agree that homosexual behavior is sinful, and so do the "wide spectrum of denominations and backgrounds."  No doubt many do, but not those churches that offer union or even marriage ceremonies to same-sex couples, nor the couples who exchange their vows in those churches.

Going by the gay Christians I've known, it's a safe bet that not even all those whose beliefs "qualify them as born-again Christians" agree that they are sinning when they have sex, in marriage or out of it.  UnChristian was published several years before the Supreme Court legalized same-sex civil marriage in the US, but American churches had been examining and revising their positions for decades by then.  Those gay people who still want to join churches have other options available to them than the brand represented by the writers of unChristian.

Because of the increased numbers of more or less openly gay people around, it takes strong determination for conservative Christians to avoid knowing us, or to pretend that they don't know us.  The rise of fundamentalist-run businesses and spaces since the 1980s might have made it easier for evangelicals to avoid dealing with outsiders, but since gay people are already Christians, we are already inside those spaces.  We are already in their families and workplaces and churches.  Even if we are immediately expelled upon discovery, they still have known us.  Perhaps they repress the unpleasant knowledge.

What, then, do Kinnaman and Lyons and their commentators have to offer to Christian LGBT people?  They are carefully vague.  Even the gay man given space at the end of the chapter, one Levi Walker, who reports that he returned to church four years earlier after "twenty years of depression, twelve years of drug addiction and dealing, and several suicide attempts" (117), says nothing about the kind of church he's in now, how it treats him, his place in it.  Walker's the kind of homosexual Christians like Kinnaman love: the drugs, the suicide attempts, the depression -- only AIDS is missing, but nobody's perfect.  The heterosexual commentators, as I noted, mainly talk about themselves and their spirituality, how bad they feel when they're stereotyped as "gay-hating bigots" (110), how they bravely had "real life" (as opposed to imaginary?)  conversations with homosexuals.

To their limited credit, no one in this book touts ex-gay ministries, at least not explicitly.  Maybe they're aware of what ineffective and scandal-ridden scams they are.  But it's fair to find in their ramblings a belief that change will occur once a homosexual joins a welcoming community, and if not that ...

As a church [writes Rick McKinley of Imago Dei], we have to hold to what Scripture says is true about the practice of homosexuality—the acting out of same sex relationships is a sin. However, we are wondering if it is possible to experience same-sex attraction but give yourself to living a celibate lifestyle. What if we could provide intimate Christ-centered community and accountability for him or her in that pursuit? We believe that community is the answer to everyone feeling loved and human [116-17].

Celibacy may be "possible" for a few, just as it's possible for a few to run a mile in under four minutes or scale Mount Everest, but it is not a realistic option for most human beings. Offering it as a solution -- to gay people, not to straights of course -- is not a good-faith approach.  (It's also Albert Mohler's bad-faith recommendation.)  As for experiencing same-sex attraction without acting on it, Kinnaman points out that "Jesus raised the bar beyond skin-on-skin contact and said even a simple thing like sexual thoughts can defile us [Matthew 5:28].  Our approach should embrace this high standard of sexuality" (104).  So Kinnaman's church, at any rate, can't even offer membership to gays on condition of overt sexual abstinence.

"It is necessary and appropriate for Christians to affirm that marriage is between one man and one woman," Kinnaman declares (105).  Appropriate perhaps, but hardly necessary, since the Biblical model was one man and numerous women, whether wives, concubines, or the odd harlot by the side of the road.  That's the original Biblical standard; the New Testament standard is that marriage is for weaklings who can't cut the mustard, either by self-mutilation (Matthew 19:12) or gritting one's teeth and abstaining from sexual life altogether (1 Corinthians 7).  Monogamy became the Christian standard not because of biblical teaching but because gentile Christians adopted Roman customs.

One would think it necessary and appropriate for Christians to affirm that divorce is not acceptable except under very narrowly defined conditions, but although Kinnaman and his commentators occasionally mention divorce as a problem because of our broken sexuality and our decadent society, they don't discuss its acceptance by evangelicals, both for themselves and their chosen politicians.  Ronald Reagan's divorced and remarried status didn't bother them at all, nor does Donald Trump's evangelical base mind his multiple marriages and divorces.  If they can overlook a lifestyle that was specifically prohibited by Jesus, perhaps they can (and probably will) learn to overlook the conflict between the Bible (though not Jesus, at least not explicitly) and same-sex sexual expression.

The olive branch Kinnaman and his commentators hold out to potential gay converts is that everybody's sexuality is "broken."  "But there is not a special judgment for homosexuals, and there is not a a special righteousness for heterosexuals," writes Shayne Wheeler of All Souls Fellowship in Georgia (page 111).  Rev. Alfred Ells of Leaders Last Ministries chimes in:

And I would add this caution: I have counseled many more straight Christians than homosexuals. Many believers are dealing with significant sexual issues, from marital unfaithfulness to pornographic addictions and other things you would not believe. Don’t underestimate the power of sexual problems—gay or straight—to devastate even the best families and the best churches [118].

That, like the recommendation of celibacy, is not going to win many homosexuals for Jesus.  Heterosexuals are granted presumably unbroken sexual expression in marriage, but homosexuals are a "sexual problem" in ourselves, like "pornographic addictions or other things you would not believe," with no loophole.  Fewer and fewer people, gay or straight, will go along with this anymore, and since there is no real moral argument against homosexuality except a biblical prohibition -- which evangelicals are as ready as other Christians to ignore when it's convenient for them -- conservative evangelicals had better expect to see their numbers continue to dwindle.

Kinnaman doesn't advocate secular laws against homosexual activity, though he's not clear as to why. He does claim that "laws provide significant parameters that determine Americans' behaviors, so lawyers and legislators should work diligently to pursue a biblical perspective that achieves appropriate goals" (105).  This is followed by his remark, quoted above, about one-man / one-woman marriage.  Apparently he hasn't heard of the First Amendment.  He concludes that "You change a country not merely by bolstering its laws but by transforming the hearts of its people" (106), but he and his ilk have failed, thankfully, to do even that much -- they have not, on the evidence of this book, even managed to transform their own.

Christians point out the importance of a father and a mother in child development and reject the claims that gay couples should be able to adopt. And, of course, I recognize that it’s offensive to homosexuals to say that a child needs both a father and a mother; it’s a difficult part of what Christians believe. However, though this is an important conviction, Christians have to avoid rhetoric that dehumanizes people, especially in interpersonal interactions. Our most important concern must be the response of young people to Christ, not merely what type of home they grew up in ... If the people of Christ attack, mock, and criticize a child's parents, the chances that the child will ever commit his or her life to Christ are diminished [106].

There's plenty wrong here, starting with the invalid assumption that gay people only become parents through adoption, and moving on to the assumption that if you can't offer an ideal (by Kinnaman's standards) set of parents you should not be allowed to have or raise children at all.  Children have been successfully raised by widowed parents, for example.  I've known children who grew up in households headed by two women, both widowed or abandoned by husbands, who turned out okay.  Children will also have an easier time if their parents aren't poor, or members of other despised minorities; but I doubt Kinnaman would want to take them away from their parents or tell them they should never have been born, no offense kids but your parents fail to meet our high Christian standards of Family.  Same-sex couples, as far as we can tell, do as well by their children as mixed ones; the absence of both male and female in the parent couple doesn't mean the kids won't have meaningful interaction with other adults.  But Kinnaman has evidently ignored all the research and discussion on this matter; if you have Scripture and Christian-Right publications, what more do you need?

I find myself wondering, though, just how he envisions Christians of his sort coming into contact with children of gay parents.  Surely not because the parents attend his church?  Maybe he just visualizes such kids wandering into his youth coffeehouse or being brought to his church by friends.  (It's a trap, kids! Don't go in!)  He even seems to be aware of the harm done by bullying. But in the end, he sees them purely as targets for conversion, though it's not impossible or unlikely that they will already be Christians, attending with their parents a church that Kinnaman doesn't approve of.

It's easy to see, on the evidence of unChristian and other handwringing writings on the declining influence of fundamentalist Christianity, why young people are staying away from their faction in droves.  (It shouldn't be forgotten that all denominations, including liberal ones, have the same problem, if it is a problem for anyone but them.)  I'm not talking only about their reactionary and harmful politics, but about their lack of engagement with actual human beings.  Despite their talk about being confident and fearless in the Lord, they come across in this book as terrified of just about everyone, to the point that having a "real life" conversation with an outsider (or even another Christian with differing views) feels risky and brave to them.  They recommend listening to others, but there's little indication in their own accounts that they do so.  They have to force themselves to make outreach, which is their right but incompatible with their own missionary platform.  As a queer atheist who's worked and talked with a wide range of people who don't agree with me over the years, I had trouble at first realizing how disengaged Kinnaman and his collaborators are.

Whatever they're selling, there's a dwindling market for it.  (I noticed that one of the more successful ministries touted by the commentators is a coffeehouse in Washington, DC, which is still around a dozen years after unChristian was published.  The commercial front, not the evangelism, probably accounts for its longevity.)  That's no ground for complacency, because even small groups of fanatics can do a lot of damage to a society.

I kept thinking of the prominent evangelical Carl F. H. Henry's remark* that "A redemptive totalitarianism is far preferable to an unredemptive democracy; a redemptive Communism far more advantageous than an unredemptive Capitalism, and vice versa."  This implies what should be obvious from much other evidence: Christianity is about purity (doctrinal and moral) and salvation, not about social justice or ordinary human decency.  Sure, you can import a concern with social justice into your implementation of Christianity (many have done it), but it's not the core of Christian concern.  According to the Gospel, helping others is not an end in itself but a means to getting oneself into Heaven.  (Besides, Christianity is about the Kingdom of God, not the Democracy of God.  Its worldview is hierarchical, not egalitarian.)

As I've said before, I don't advocate the a priori exclusion of Christians (or members of other religions) from public discourse.  But their Christianity is independent of whatever of value they have to contribute.  (I feel the same way about many atheists, who are apt to inject their fantasies about "the visions of Bronze Age goatherds" and other village-atheist bullshit to derail serious discussions.)  As unChristian shows once again, even on their own turf conservative evangelicals have very little to contribute; at best they distract from the serious thought and work that needs to be done.

*In The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism, originally published in 1947.  Quoted here.

Justice, You've Been Served!

On Monday Democracy Now! rebroadcast a 2006 interview with the late Daniel Berrigan.  It includes his account of an exchange with former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara in 1965 about the Vietnam war, with the unintentionally (I presume) funny aside that Berrigan had to ask a secretary at the magazine he was publishing to transcribe McNamara's response "in shorthand" -- he couldn't write it down himself?  Isn't a Christian supposed to serve rather than be served?

The part that prompted me to write, though, was this, at the end of the interview:

AMY GOODMAN: You’ve continued to get arrested. Do you think these arrests, what you have engaged in, protest, even when people are not being arrested or jailed, have an effect? I mean, you have gone through a number of wars now. Do you think things are getting better, or do you think they’re getting worse?

FATHER DANIEL BERRIGAN: No. No. This is the worst time of my long life, really. I’ve never seen such a base and cowardly violation of any kind of human bond that I can respect. These people appear on television, and the unwritten, unspoken motto seems to be something about "We despise you. We despise your law. We despise your order. We despise your Bible. We despise your conscience. And if necessary, we will kill you to say so." I’ve never really felt that deep contempt before for any kind of canon or tradition of the human.
 
AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean, "We despise your Bible"? It is often said it’s done in the name of the Bible.

FATHER DANIEL BERRIGAN: Well, yes, these people are—they’re making a scrapbook out of the Bible in their own favor. And they’re omitting all the passages that have to do with compassion and love of others, especially love of enemies, or the injunction to Peter, "Put up your sword. Those who live by the sword will perish by the sword"—all of that. All of that gets cut out in favor of, well, a god of vindictiveness, the god of the empire, the god who is a projection of our will to dominate.

I respect and honor Berrigan's tireless activism over many decades, but I could never really trust anyone so intellectually and morally dishonest as to say something like this.  Berrigan himself was "making a scrapbook out of the Bible in [his] own favor."  He omitted all the passages that have to do with the killing of those who worship the wrong gods or are living in the wrong territory or simply failed to meet the deity's high standards.  The "god of vindictiveness, the god of the empire, the god who is a projection of our will to dominate" is Yahweh, the god of the Bible, and his son and viceroy Jesus. While Berrigan was correct about others' selective use of the Bible, he himself was constructing a god who was a projection of his own will.  It was perhaps bad luck on Berrigan's part that he grew up in a tradition defined by the Christian Bible, a book full of violence and hatred as well as professions of love and compassion and peace, since in order to oppose war and empire he had to engage in the same cut-and-paste job he condemned (rather self-righteously, I must say) in others.

But at the same time it must be remembered that Berrigan chose to remain in the Christian, and specifically the Roman Catholic tradition, and hamstrung himself by using the fundamentalist assumption of biblical inerrancy: if you interpret the Bible correctly -- that is, if you agree with his interpretation -- it will be true, free from all error, and by remarkable coincidence will agree with Father Dan!  In order to sustain this belief he had to lie about his opponents, by implying that because they conveniently ignored the parts of the Bible that were inexpedient for them, they rejected it entirely.  But the same accusation could be made of him: If cherry-picking the Bible means that you "despise" it, then he despised the Bible no less than the warmakers do.  The difficult thing to do, with the Bible or any other scripture or authority, is to say forthrightly that it is not free from error, that it is wrong and you reject the parts that are wrong, while recognizing that they are there.  If I weren't prone to the same temptation, I'd be amazed that so many people find this non-fundamentalist approach so difficult.  It is difficult, but it can be done.  Once you admit the possibility, it becomes easier.  Instead Berrigan chose to present his own projection as if it were truth.

Even if Christians leave the Tanakh, with its divine commands to exterminate whole populations, out of the picture, they are still stuck with the Jesus of the gospels, whose vindictiveness deserves more attention than it usually gets.  Jesus not only threatened people with eternal torture, he was preaching in the apocalyptic tradition which expects Yahweh to establish his Kingdom on earth (as it is in Heaven) through a cataclysmic war between Good and Evil, reaching a climax as "the wine press was trodden outside the city, and blood came out from the wine press, up to the horses' bridles, for a distance of two hundred miles" (Revelation 14.20; the metaphors get tangled up there, but the meaning in context is clear).  Whether he liked it or not, whether he thought it through or not, this is the Jesus Dan Berrigan followed.

Some Christians I've talked to try to get around this problem by arguing that while God is of course a loving god, he also is a god of justice.  The answer to that is simple enough: punishment is not justice.  As the philosopher Antony Flew declared:

Now, if anything at all can be known to be wrong, it seems to me to be unshakably certain that it would be wrong to make any sentient being suffer eternally for any offense whatever.  Thus a religious commitment which must involved the glorification of such behavior as if it were a manifestation of perfect justice and goodness would be repugnant to ordinary decency and humanity; even if the facts were such that in prudence we had to trample down our generous impulses in a rat-race for salvation [The Presumption of Atheism, 1976, 64].

The fantasy of Hell can't have been invented out of a desire to teach people they've been doing wrong, since part of the fun is that if they do learn anything from their punishment, it's too late, because they're in Hell!  Forever!  Hahahaha!  The apologist C. S. Lewis tried to justify it in The Problem of Pain in 1940.  Imagine, he proposed, 

a man who has risen to wealth or power by a continued course of treachery and cruelty, by exploiting for purely selfish ends the noble motions of his victims, laughing the while at their simplicity ... Suppose, further that he does all this, not (as we like to imagine) tormented by remorse or even misgiving, but eating like a schoolboy and sleeping like a healthy infant ....

We must be careful at this point.  The least indulgence of the passion for revenge is very deadly sin.  Christian charity counsels us to make every effort for the conversion of such a man ... But that is not the point.  Supposing he will not be converted, what destiny in the eternal world can you regard as proper for him?  Can you really desire that such a man, remaining what he is (and he must be able to do that if he has free will) should be confirmed forever in his present happiness ...?  And if you cannot regard this as tolerable, is it only your wickedness -- only spite -- that prevents you from doing so? ... You are moved, not by a desire for the wretched creature's pain as such, by a truly ethical demand that, soon or late, the right should be asserted, the flag planted in this horribly rebellious soul, even if no fuller and better conquest is to follow.  In a sense, it is better for the creature to know itself, even if it never becomes good, that it should know itself a failure, a mistake.  Even mercy can hardly wish to such a man his eternal, contented continuance in such ghastly illusion [122].

Of course Lewis made things too easy for himself by supposing that there were only two possible options: Heaven or Hell.  An infinitely wise and omnipotent Creator could do better than that.  But even accepting Lewis's terms, I would send his wicked man to Heaven.  I assume that Heaven is a place without suffering, so that he will be able to make no one else suffer.  If this will curtail his free will, everyone's free will must be curtailed in Heaven if there's to be no suffering there.  In Heaven the man's "continued course of treachery and cruelty" would give him no advantage, as it did on earth.  (Which raises the question why Lewis's god arranged his creation so that bad people can flourish.  In what sense, given that arrangement, is the wicked man's bad behavior "a failure, a mistake"?)  Since Lewis represents his complacency as based on his worldly success and happiness, which would mean nothing in Heaven, is it accurate to say that he could 'remain what he is'?  But even if he could, so what?  The important thing would be that he couldn't hurt anyone else.  Lewis assumed that the only way that "soon or late, the right should be asserted" is by stomping on it for all eternity; it never seems to have occurred to him that rebellion might be quelled by mercy as well as by punishment.  One thing we know is that punishment is not an effective way of changing people's behavior; if Yahweh has such a thing for punishment, why did he create us so that it would be ineffective?

I like to quote Michael Neumann's remark that "Where ‘respect’ means not beating people or putting them in jail or driving them from their homes, it is a fine idea. But you shouldn’t do those things even to people you hold in contempt."  I think this should be extended: you shouldn't do those things even to bad people.  I think that many people would disagree, even Christians who, according to orthodox teaching, believe that we are all bad people.  But then it's also orthodox teaching that God is entitled to beat or jail or torture all of humanity, and only tempers "justice" with mercy by letting some of us off; again, I deny that punishment is just in the first place. This is a matter of judgment, of course, not of fact or even of logical demonstration.  But the same is true of the mindset that demands infinite retaliation for "rebellion," and that indeed sees harm done to others are primarily an offense against a deity rather than against the people actually harmed.  And I ask what good is achieved (other than the "passion for vengeance" Lewis rejected while still clinging to it) by punishment at all.

Going back to Daniel Berrigan: I don't object to his rejection of the wrathful aspects of Christianity.  What I do object to is his pretense that those aspects aren't a core part of the religion, and of Jesus' teaching in particular.  It's not only dishonest to denounce those who believe in a "god who is a projection of our will to dominate" (though that is reason enough to reject his projection), but it will be ineffective as long as Christians refer to the New Testament and the teachings of Jesus.  Jesus believed in, and taught, a god of vindictiveness and empire and a projection of our will to dominate.  The only way to correct that teaching (assuming it is incorrect) is to confront it head-on, and reject it directly rather than by projecting it onto the bad Other, as Berrigan did, and so many other Christians do.

Onward, Christian Soldiers

This image has been making the rounds lately, and I must say I agree completely.  If you're using the Bible to hurt people, you're using it wrong: you should be using a sword, or a battle axe, as the Lord intended. You can't do any serious, God-breathed damage with a floppy leather-covered book. Geez!

This is basically the "No True Scotsman" move, which isn't an argument but an attempt to distract your attention.  Since there are numerous passages in the Torah and Prophets where Yahweh commands Israel to murder all the pagans and their livestock and burn their cities to the ground, it seems that "loving thy neighbor and even thy enemy" is perfectly compatible with mass slaughter.  One Christian told me that God had to do this, because otherwise the Israelites would have enslaved the people, and that would be worse than killing them. He forgot that in other Canaanite cities, Yahweh commanded that at least some of the inhabitants (virgin females, usually) should be enslaved.

In the New Testament, love is evidently compatible with Jesus verbally attacking his fellow Jews and condemning people to eternal torture if they didn't meet his impossibly high standards of attitude and conduct. Sometimes he just insulted people at random, like the pagan Syrophoenician woman he called a dog when she begged him to heal her sick daughter. Yahweh and Jesus can hardly be dismissed as marginal figures, bad apples who make Judaism and Christianity look bad.

It's ironic to see this meme citing Paul, who wrote, or rather dictated, the letter to the Romans, because Paul is a popular whipping boy for liberal and especially for gay Christians.  Even a lot of self-identified non-Christians denounce Paul as the original betrayer, worse than Judas, who replaced Christ's simple and beautiful message of Love with a bunch of Jewish stuff.  In any case, Paul talked pretty sometimes, just as Jesus did sometimes, but he could also be harsh when his congregations got out of line or he had to contend with other Christian missionaries whose teachings conflicted with his.  Love, for Paul, must therefore be compatible with sayings like

You suffered from your own people the same things those churches suffered from the Jews who killed the Lord Jesus and the prophets and also drove us out. They displease God and are hostile to everyone in their effort to keep us from speaking to the Gentiles so that they may be saved. In this way they always heap up their sins to the limit. The wrath of God has come upon them at last.

Love must also be compatible with the outpourings of rage I've seen from LGBT and allied people in response to the antigay Christians who denounced last week's Supreme Court decision on same-sex marriage, since their reactions generally accuse their opponents of "hate."  This implies that the pro-gay side is motivated by "love."  They could've fooled me.

Is "hate" compatible with authentic religion?  I'm an atheist; it's not for me to say, and I really don't have an opinion on the matter.  Personally I think that hate is as valid as love, and I'm not the first person who's noticed that they aren't that far apart, whether in sacred or secular domains.  It seems obvious to me that not only ordinary believers but the great exemplars of religions have spoken and behaved hatefully as often as they have spoken and believed lovingly.  If you take the Bible as an account of the wishes of Yahweh, which seems reasonable to me, there's no question that he often wanted large numbers of people to be butchered to appease his wrath; if you don't take the Bible as an account of the wishes of Yahweh, I don't know what evidence there is that he disapproves of slaughtering whole populations who worship the wrong gods, or worship the putatively right one in the wrong way.  The popular way out of this problem is to insist that when Yahweh commanded mass killing, when he erupted into paroxysms of misogynist abuse, when Jesus threatened the mass of humanity with eternal punishment, they did so in a spirit of Love that is so far above the pathetic human standard that we can only contemplate it with awe and humble self-abasement at our failure to be as holy as they.  It's impossible to prove such claims wrong, since they have nothing to do with reason; but one can still reject them.  One can still say, with Huck Finn: All right then, I'll go to Hell.

As far as I've ever seen, though, no religious teacher, ancient or contemporary, explicitly preaches Hate.  They all insist that they are preaching Love.  Even the Westboro Baptist Church, as far as I know, claims that God hates fags; if they also hate us, it's because they must stand with God, and hate what he hates. And why not?  But most believers call their teachings Love.  The liberal gay and pro-gay allies who expressed their eagerness to see a Texas preacher immolate himself in protest of same-sex marriage being legalized, don't seem to have thought they were preaching hate; they thought he was the hater, so by the simple process of elimination they must be full of Love.  It doesn't seem that he actually said he would do it -- like a true War Wimp for Jesus, he said that other people should put their lives on the line for traditional marriage -- but who cares about facts?  There's no time to be accurate, honest, or rational!  We're fighting a war against Hate here!  Ironically, the only Christian minister who's actually set himself on fire in response to this issue was a pro-gay Methodist who burned himself to death in 2014, leaving a suicide note explaining that "the self-immolation was an attempt to die a martyr for the black and LGBT communities." 

Arguing about whether hate is compatible with true religion (or true atheism, for that matter) seems to me a distraction from more important questions.  It's so much easier, though, than thinking.

But back to the meme that set me off.  I know it's no fun to have other people tell you that you're going to Hell, or that you're a bad person because of your sexual tastes and practices, and if you're unlucky enough to be isolated in a hostile community, it can be very unpleasant.  People who've been wounded emotionally by such communities can be excused if they have trouble discussing these issues rationally, but they're in no position to condemn others for irrationality -- especially if their responses consist mainly of "Oh yeah?  Well, you're going to Hell!"  Which they mostly do.  See you in Hell, folks!

Providential Coincidences

At the public library recently I came across a book called Bible Babel: Making Sense of the Most Talked About Book of All Time (HarperCollins, 2010) by Kristin Swenson, a professor of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia.  I leafed through it and thought it looked like a convenient summary of current research and knowledge about the Bible for laypeople, so I checked it out.  It turned out to be a book I could recommend to people who wanted such a summary, and I was gratified to find that it had little information I didn't already know.

There was one thing I disagreed with strenuously, though.  In her discussion of Moses and the Exodus, Swenson tries to find a factual basis for the ten plagues that Yahweh sent to nudge Pharaoh into letting his people go.

Whether or not the plagues of Exodus] really happened is a question we cannot answer for certain. There is no reference to such events in Egyptian sources, and, as noted above, historical accuracy did not seem to be the biblical authors’ primary aim. Although two psalms also list the plagues, they do so in a different order and each includes only seven (probably reflecting a liturgical function), but not exactly the same seven.

One of the most convincing theories of how these events may have transpired presumes a seasonal situation gone bad. Flagellate organisms from Lake Tana worked their way into the Nile during the annual flooding period and sucked up all the oxygen, killing the fish. Frogs migrated out of the flooded river as they normally would but were infected by bacteria, Bacillus anthracis, possibly exacerbated by the decomposing fish.

The biting insects should probably be understood as mosquitoes – not “gnats,” as in many translations. They would have reached unbearable numbers as the high floodwaters receded. As for the flies, well, just imagine all those decomposing critters. It’s possible that at this point, the livestock, which had been safely secured some distance from the floodwaters, became infected with the same anthrax as the frogs. According to Greta Hort, it was transmitted by the fly Stomaxys calcitrans, which bites people and animals alike – perhaps explaining the boils. As for the storm, such weather isn’t common in Egypt, but it isn’t unheard of, either. Swarming locusts are more common, and the occasional khamsin (Arabic for an intense sandstorm) would have made the day seem dark as night. The most likely period for these events would have been August to May, a bit longer than the narrative suggests. The biblical story isn’t explicit about duration [192].

This is euhemerism, an ancient and popular critical tactic which tries to get rid of miracle stories by postulating that the events described actually happened, but were misunderstood or gradually enhanced with marvelous additions.  (Or that gods were originally human heroes whose exploits were exaggerated in the retelling.)

Euhemerism has been used to debunk mythology and to defend it.  James Barr wrote in Fundamentalism (Westminster Press, 1977) that euhemerism was common in conservative evangelical writing in the 1950s and 1960s, but it also turned up in conservative scholarship of the same period.  And, of course, euhemeristic explanations of the Star of Bethlehem circulate every year during Christmas season.  In his review of a respectable scholarly 1955 commentary on the gospel of Mark by Vincent Taylor, for example, Morton Smith criticized

T[aylor]'s insistence that the tale "has not yet attained the rounded form of a Miracle-story proper and stands nearer the testimony of eyewitnesses" (ib.) - who fundamentally misunderstood what happened. This objection applies to T.'s treatment of all the major miracle stories. As already noted, 'vivid details' lead him to conclude that every Markan story of Jesus' miracles (except the blasting of the figtree) is told from eye-witness tradition. At the same time, he will not admit that any of the major miracles happened: Jesus did not walk on the sea, but waded through the surf by the shore (p. 327) ; his apparent cure of the Syro-Phoenician's daughter (p. 348) and his apparent stilling of the storm (p. 273) were providential coincidences ('brilliant timing,' Moule, ib.) ; and so on. So Mk.'s 'narrative is everywhere credible' (p. 318) as to everything but what Mk. meant to narrate. Clearly, this position is the product, not of criticism, but of the conflict of two apologetic techniques - to defend Mk. directly by accepting his stories, and to defend him indirectly by getting rid of his miracles.*

The trouble with this strategy, as Smith indicated, is that it tends to rely on "providential coincidences" and "brilliant timing."  Moses just happened to dip his staff into the Nile at a time of year when it was going to run red anyway (and the credulous Egyptians, who'd observed such changes before, were taken completely by surprise), and the rest of the "plagues" were just a natural sequence of events that followed in their turn.  This sequence of plagues can't be used to verify or date the Exodus, then, since it would probably have occurred numerous times in Egyptian history.

This explanation also falters because, as Swenson admits,

If these nine plagues really did happen in a manner that can be explained as natural events, the tenth cannot.  Try as we might (and there are some imaginative theories out there), the tenth and final plague, the death of the firstborn, defies natural explanation.  In the story, God instructs the Hebrew people to slaughter a lamb and spread its blood on their doorways before roasting and eating it.  That would mark which households to spare as the LORD passed through Egypt, killing firstborn children and even firstborn animals… [192].

Her authority for this "convincing theory," the Danish scholar Greta Horst, seems to have been bolder.  I haven't read Hort's articles** completely yet, but I noticed that she did attempt to speculate on a "natural" explanation for the killing of Egypt's firstborn.  That should be interesting, because it would also have to explain why smearing blood on the doorframes of the Israelites' houses would protect them.  (The story also includes one of those charming revelations of Yahweh's moral character, for he "gave the people favor in the sight of the Egyptians. Furthermore, the man Moses himself was greatly esteemed in the land of Egypt, both in the sight of Pharaoh’s servants and in the sight of the people" [Exodus 11:3], but he "said to Moses, 'Pharaoh will not listen to you, so that My wonders will be multiplied in the land of Egypt.' Moses and Aaron performed all these wonders before Pharaoh; yet the Lord hardened Pharaoh’s heart, and he did not let the sons of Israel go out of his land [Exodus 11:9-10]."  In other words, it wasn't Pharaoh's fault that he didn't free the Israelites -- Yahweh made him do it, in order to let him show off his power some more.)

Of course the plagues look like "natural events." If Yahweh or any other god (including Nature) sends epidemics, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, droughts, etc., then it's possible to describe those events in naturalistic terms.  The question for believers, however, is whether those events were literal acts of their gods, and if so, what message the acts were meant to convey.  Science can't answer that question; but believers disagree among themselves about the answers.

What I find odd is that although euhemeristic explanations have also been offered for some New Testament stories, as I've indicated, Kristin Swenson only resorts to the tactic in writing about the Exodus.  She must know that it's a dubious approach, largely discredited in scholarship about religion.  The nineteenth-century theologian David Strauss mounted a strong attack on it in his Life of Jesus [1835-36, translated into English by George Eliot*** in 1846], which provoked a shitstorm of condemnation from the orthodox.  (Another act of God, no doubt.)  Yet euhemerism moves.

* Morton Smith, "Comments on Taylor's commentary on Mark."  Harvard Theological Review 48: 21-64, page 36.
** Greta Hort, “The Plagues of Egypt,” in two articles published by Zeitschrift für die Alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 69(1-4) (1957): 84-103; and 70(1-2) (1958): 48-59.
*** Yes, that George Eliot.

I've Got a Little List

Another of my right-wing acquaintances, this one a guy I went to high school with, posted a link to the above meme last night.  It's worth noticing, I think, because the claim that Bibles and prayer aren't allowed in school is so popular in certain circles, and because it's a flat lie.  I commented:

It's false that Bibles are not permitted in schools. I realize that the truth doesn't matter to Christians; I'm just pointing it out for the record.

I didn't really expect to get a response, but this morning I found that another person from my high school had asked:

To what Christian types does the truth not matter?

I replied:

Just for a start: those who post stuff like this.

I think I've said before that there seem to be some public-school teachers and others who may genuinely believe that they mustn't allow their students to pray on their own initiative during the school day, or read the Bible, or use Biblical material in class discussion or for writing assignments and the like.  But that would certainly be because they've believed the false claims of religious reactionaries who misrepresent Supreme Court decisions which forbid public schools to impose religious observances (like prayer or devotional Bible-reading) on their students.  (A misrepresentation which surely casts doubt on the implication of the meme that people who read the Bible are more honest or conscientious than those who don't.)

Of course, I exaggerated slightly in implying that there are no Christians to whom the truth matters.  I can think of several; but I think of them as the exception that proves the rule, since they generally are the targets of attack from other Christians for what they say and write.  Ironically perhaps, they aren't particularly "radical" (whatever that means in a modern Christian context) or even dissident in their theology: I have in mind the scholars James Barr and Dennis Nineham, from whose work I've learned so much.  Both are ordained clergymen in mainline denominations as well as scholars, and they seem comfortable enough in their churches.

But here's another example of dishonesty about religion from a source I've noticed before:

This one was shared by some Facebook friends who are gay and not religiously orthodox but still seem to want to find shelter under His wings.  My objection is what it was before: I see no reason to believe that there's a supreme or superior being who's doing anything for starving babies or people with cancer.  This meme is like a kid saying, "Mom, I don't have time to take out the garbage, I'm doing my homework, I have a big test tomorrow I have to study for!" -- while really he's watching Internet porn.  And if there's anyone who can't use the excuse of not having time, it's God.

Oh Myyy ...

This meme has been making the rounds on Facebook this week, and George Takei just spread it, so it's taking off.  I've composed a brief critical comment that I've been posting every time it turns up, which really ought to be enough, right?  Because we're all entitled to our opinions in a free society, right?  Haters gonna hate, but I know who I am and what I stand for, right?  But since I believe that people should be prepared to defend their stances with argument and fact, I'm going to go a step further.

Presumably by "sinful" the maker of this meme means "forbidden by the Bible," since he or she makes some claims about what the Bible says.  Some of those claims are at best shaky, and some are flat-out false.  But from the start there's a begged question: many people don't tie their opposition to same-sex marriage on the claim that "homosexuality is sinful," but because of various assumptions about the nature of marriage -- that it is a religious institution, for example, despite the necessity of civil marriage in American society.  Many gay people agree on that point, of course, and want religious ceremonies to ratify their unions.  Think of the city of San Francisco, which supplied religious officiants and dispensed blessings even to people who registered en masse for domestic partnerships.  That seems a blatant violation of separation of church and state to me, and surely not all the couples involved were religious in the first place.  But this is a time-honored violation, since clergy are brought in to bless state highway overpasses, and just about everything else.

So let's look at the content of this meme.  The first point is that "Jesus never uttered a word about same-sex relationships."  The first thing to notice is that the meme-maker is changing the subject, as will become clearer presently: the subject of the meme is "homosexuality," not "same-sex relationships."  Leaving that aside for the moment, it's trivially true that Jesus in the gospels doesn't mention men boning each other.  (Though not all gay Christians would agree about that.  Some believe that Jesus "affirmed a gay couple," referring to the centurion whose dying slave Jesus healed.  It's not certain that these men were sexually involved with each other, but it's a tribute to the high moral standards of today's Christians that they think Jesus would approve the sexual use of a slave of either sex.  Some have also argued that the Ethiopian eunuch mentioned in Acts 8 was a gay man, but that's not likely.)  This is what's known as an argument from silence, which is usually considered a no-no in scholarly circles.  That the gospels don't report him saying anything on the subject doesn't mean he never did so; and Jesus' silence about sex between males doesn't necessarily mean he approved of it.  But he never said anything about a lot of subjects, such as slavery, and the gospels do report that he took a rather dim view of sex in general.  The Jesus of the gospels is not a sexual liberal: he expected his heterosexual followers to keep their libidos on a tight leash, even refraining from lustful thoughts.  His stricture against divorce and remarriage was so extreme that his disciples concluded that it was better not to marry at all, though some of them already were; and he didn't disagree with them.  If gay Christians want to apply those principles to themselves, more power to them, but I haven't noticed that any do.  Jesus' reported silence on homosexuality, then, is not much comfort to gay Christians.

"The [Old Testament] also said it's sinful to eat shellfish, to wear clothes woven with different fabrics, and to eat pork."  Trivially true, but none of these require the execution of the offender.  This is a popular approach among gay Christian apologists, who usually overlook the small detail of the death penalty, which indicates that Yahweh considered sex between males a rather graver offense than eating pork.  Apologists also like to confuse impurity / uncleanness with "abomination," again overlooking the fact that impurity is remedied by at most some days of isolation and then a ritual washing.  (According to the Torah a woman was impure for a given period after giving birth, but no one would argue that the Bible considers childbirth sinful.  I hope.)  Sin in general can be atoned for with sacrifice, and it's noteworthy that atonement doesn't seem to be an option for men who have sex with other men.

The other trouble with this retort (it's not an argument) is that the proper response would be to observe the whole Torah, not to throw the whole thing out.  Christians, according to the Apostle Paul (not to Jesus) are free of the Torah, or most of it, or something.  Some of its standards still are binding even on Christians, including those relating to sex.   (Except for divorce, which Paul agreed was mostly unacceptable.)  After all, Jesus said that the greatest commandment was to love Yahweh your god with all your heart, and how better to show your love than by obeying his every wish, instead of picking and choosing at your own selfish convenience?

"The original language of the N.T. actually refers to male prostitution, molestation, and promiscuity, not committed same-sex relationships.  Paul may have spoken against homosexuality, but he also said that women should be silent and never assume authority over a man."  (One commenter on Facebook pointed out that Paul's requirement of silence for women referred only to worship services; he was incorrect, however, that the ban on female authority was similarly limited.)  The claim that the NT "actually refers to male prostitution, molestation and promiscuity" is false.  The meme-maker probably has in mind 1 Corinthians 6:9 and 1 Timothy 9:9-10, which consist of lists of sins that will keep one out of the kingdom of heaven.  Some of the Greek words have been translated as referring to homosexuality, but because these words are rare and there is no real context, scholars are still not sure what they mean.  To claim that they really refer to male prostitution, molestation, and promiscuity is as dishonest as to claim that they refer to "homosexuality."  (I suspect that by "molestation" the writer meant "child molestation," which is still false.)  And to repeat, the vital doctrine of Christian freedom from Torah is in Paul only: Jesus never says a word about it, so I suppose it can be tossed out and Christians will start keeping kosher.

By bringing in "committed same-sex relationships," I think the writer means to claim that the New Testament only condemned exploitative and abusive expressions of sexuality, not warm mature loving Christian couples.  There's no reason to think so, because loving relationships between males were part of the Greco-Roman landscape in Jesus and Paul's day, celebrated in poetry and drama, and the Jewish polemic against paganism condemned them along with prostitution and "promiscuity."  (See, for example, my discussion of Robin Scroggs' book on the New Testament and homosexuality, here.)

"Because God created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve."  "That was when the earth wasn't populated.  There are now 6.79 billion people.  Breeding clearly isn't an issue any more!"  It wasn't an issue when Yahweh forbade men to have sex with each other, either.  Or, it was at least as much an issue when Paul and Jesus encouraged their followers not to marry at all.  As far as I know, there's no evidence that homosexuality interferes with "breeding" anyhow.

"The Bible also defines marriage as one-man-many-woman, one man many wives and many concubines, a rapist and his victim, and conquering soldier & female prisoner of war."  This being so, why are gay Christians so insistent that they don't approve of polygamy?  It's a biblical value, after all, like slavery.  Yet gay Christians always agree with their antigay opponents that polygamy is as yucky as marrying your first cousin.  To sum up what I've written before, Christianity rejected polygamy mainly because of the influence of Roman culture (and also perhaps because of Christianity's general dislike of marriage at all: at most, one spouse).

Which brings me to the final riposte, against the declaration that gay sex is just plain disgusting.  "Props for being honest.  However, a whole population of people shouldn't have their families discriminated against just because you think gay sex is icky.  Grow up!"  "A whole population of people" is presumably courtesy of your Department of Redundancy Department; more seriously, it assumes that gay people are a discrete "population" separate from general humanity, which I think is debatable.  And I've noticed that many gay and pro-gay people are opposed to polygamy and to marriage between cousins, not because they have any arguments against such families but because it's obviously gross.

Behold, the meme-maker has given you two choices: one, "Have fun living your sexist, chauvinistic, xenophobic lifestyle choice.  The rest of culture will advance forward without you."  The Department of Redundancy Department is still hard at work, I see.  Two, "Congratulations on being part of civilized society!"  To paraphrase Gandhi, civilized society would be a good idea.  It would also be nice if gay Christians and their allies were any more scrupulous about fact and logic than their antigay opponents.

Prophecies of Mass Destruction

I've been meaning for a while to write more about "end-times" stuff, but it's such a big subject; the last time I sat down to write about what should be a simple topic (homosexuality and Christianity), I ended up with 500 or so typewritten pages. I learned a lot by doing that, so it was worth it. And really, this is a much smaller topic, but it lends itself to a lot of misunderstanding and misrepresentation.

Still, I'm going to duck the main event for awhile longer. Today I'm reading Elaine Pagels's newest book, Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation (Viking Penguin, 2012). Pagels got her start as a student of the Nag Hammadi "library" of mostly Christian writings that were discovered in Egypt in 1945. Her 1979 book The Gnostic Gospels established her as a popularizer of early Christianity, both orthodox and heterodox; it also made her a convenient target for reactionary Christians who wanted to stick with a medieval version of Christian history.

In the new book she tries to put the biblical Apocalypse of John (also known as the Book of Revelation; "apocalypse" means uncovering or revelation) into its historical context. I've written before about the Apocalypse and the way it makes many orthodox Christians uncomfortable even though it is in the canon; unlike the Nag Hammadi books and others, it's an official part of the Christian (though not the Jewish) Bible. Pagels isn't uncomfortable with the material, but I'm still not very happy with her account of it, though I admit that my displeasure comes down more to matters of interpretation than of major questions of fact.

For example, Pagels believes that Jesus' prediction of the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple (Matthew 24:1; Mark 13:2; Luke 21:5) is authentic -- that is, the gospel writers didn't invent and put the prediction into his mouth, he actually made it himself. She summarizes her reasons for thinking so.

First, because other prophets had made similar predictions before its destruction, as did Jesus ben Ananias, in the early 60s; second, because Mark's account is contradictory, claiming that Jesus was accused of having threatened to destroy the temple -- an accusation Mark insists is entirely false (Mark 14:56-58); third, when Mark admits that Jesus did prophesy the temple's destruction (Mark 13:1-2), the account of his words does not accord with what had actually happened, as one would expect with retrojected prophecy (there are stones standing upon others -- quite a few of them, to this day) [184 note 31].

I don't find this persuasive. Her first point, about earlier predictions, could just as easily support an argument that Jesus' predictions were inauthentic, especially since the example she gives also is known only from a source written after the destruction of the Temple, namely Josephus' Jewish War. The story also contains some dubious details that I won't go into now; click through, read it and see what you think. (People are apt to invent after-the-fact omens; there are people, for instance, who believe that John Kennedy went to Dallas on November 22, 1963, knowing that he would be assassinated there.) Her second point is strange, though it's true that Mark's account is contradictory. Notice that Mark's 'admission' occurs before the accusation was made against Jesus; and that a prediction is not a threat, though people are prone to confuse the two. Numerous scholars have argued that someone might have overheard Jesus' prediction and mistaken it for a threat, but this is highly speculative, and the gospel writers seem to be as confused about the matter as Jesus' accusers would have been.

In her final point Pagels seems to shoot herself in the foot. If the prediction isn't accurate, then it's a false prediction, and we know what the Bible says about false prophets. But a lot of Christians, ranging from laypeople to scholars, have assumed that it was accurate: that the Temple was totally destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE as Jesus foretold it. The authors of the gospels probably never saw the extent of the destruction -- Church tradition has all of them writing far from Jerusalem, so even the most orthodox Christian has no basis for assuming otherwise -- and Mark probably didn't know whether one stone was left standing upon another. And Mark put another false prediction into the same passage, namely that Jesus would return on clouds of glory at the right hand of Power before the generation of his original followers had died off. Was that one authentic, too?

Which brings me to the main reason why the presence of an accurate prediction in an apocalyptic discourse counts against its authenticity, and not in its favor: in a typical apocalypse, most of its predictions are "retrojected," because normally an apocalypse is written from the viewpoint of someone who lived long before -- centuries in the case of Daniel or Enoch, decades in the case of Jesus. The predictions begin from the past figure's own time, and are taken from history, not prediction, until the present time of the apocalyptic writer. Daniel, for example, is supposed to have lived during the Babylonian exile (586-538 BCE), but most scholars believe that the Book of Daniel was written in the mid-to-late 160s BCE. The "predictions" in the book stop being accurate at the time of its writing, so there's no reason to believe that Daniel accurately foresaw historical events from 538 to 165 BCE; the author of the book retrojected them. (The New Testament Revelation is an exception to this pattern; the writer who was granted the visions is avowedly writing not about the distant future but about recent events and events very soon to come. He was wrong too.) So, when you find accurate predictions in an apocalyptic work, the best presumption is that they were written after the fact. Even if Jesus did predict the destruction of the Temple, he also evidently predicted his return immediately afterward; so either he got lucky, or Mark invented the prediction (or it was invented by someone Mark used as a source) and put it into Jesus' mouth.

We'll never know for certain because we don't know exactly when the gospels were written or what material their authors had to work with. Pagels agrees with many if not most other New Testament scholars that the gospels were written after the burning and desecration of the Temple in 70, which is another reason to conclude that Jesus' prediction was invented to fit the history.

A large part of the problem isn't Pagels's fault. Standard early Christian history is complicated by scholars' need to reconcile the confused and historically unreliable New Testament material with sound historical practice. So, for example, while discussing the Apocryphon (or Secret Book) of James from Nag Hammadi, she writes,

Here the author deliberately recalls -- and challenges -- what many Christians believe, having read the New Testament Book of Acts. For the Book of Acts says that after Jesus died, he appeared to his disciples in resurrected form and continued to speak with them for forty days, but that then he ascended bodily into heaven: "As they were watching ... a cloud took him out of their sight. While he was going ... they were gazing upward toward heaven." Traditionally, Christians have taken this to mean that after that time, those seeking access to Jesus could find it only indirectly, through "apostolic tradition," as they called the oral and written accounts that the apostles were said to have handed down for the benefit of those born too late to ever speak directly with Jesus [87-88, italics and ellipsis in original].

Ay, what a mess. I'm not sure how much of this is Pagels's account of what "many Christians believe" and how much is what she thinks the New Testament actually says. Start with the Book of Acts, which was probably written by the same person who wrote the gospel of Luke. Although Acts does say that Jesus ascended to heaven after forty days, it also shows Jesus appearing to various people after that time. Not only did Jesus appear "in his resurrected form" to Paul (Acts 9:3ff), which is hardly obscure, but

¹⁰ ...there was a certain disciple at Damascus, named Ananias; and to him said the Lord in a vision, Ananias. And he said, Behold, I am here, Lord.

¹¹And the Lord said unto him, Arise, and go into the street which is called Straight, and enquire in the house of Judas for one called Saul, of Tarsus: for, behold, he prayeth,

¹²And hath seen in a vision a man named Ananias coming in, and putting his hand on him, that he might receive his sight.

Even according to Acts, then, Jesus appeared to at least two people after he'd ascended into heaven, so what "many Christians believe, having read the New Testament Book of Acts" is not what the New Testament Book of Acts says. And that's only Acts. According to the gospel of Matthew, which doesn't mention an ascension into heaven, Jesus appeared to his disciples in Galilee, and told them, "... and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the world" (28:20). If the author of Matthew had written his own Acts of the Apostles, it would probably have looked quite different from Luke's Acts. One reason Christians have been able to rely on Acts so much is that, unlike the gospels, it has no New Testament competitors for the period it covers. (Except for Paul's own writings, which are also inconsistent with Acts on numerous points.)

This is ironic, considering the wrath of orthodox Christians over scholarly and popular interest in non-canonical Christian writings like the Nag Hammadi material. They claim that they follow the New Testament writings, which are the only authoritative early Christian sources -- but in fact, much of what they believe is not what is written in the New Testament: they omit and add and reinterpret to suit their needs. Not that Pagels's account, or the non-canonical books she discusses, are authoritative either: they're just different.

(One minor, maybe technical point that keeps bugging me: strictly speaking, "revelation / apocalypse" isn't prophecy, and prophecy isn't apocalypse. Scholars usually distinguish between the two genres, and I'll try to write more about this before long. Maybe more important, as Pagels surely knows, prophecy doesn't necessarily involve prediction, especially not prediction of the far future. A prophet is a human being, not always male, through whom a god speaks. He or she may have visions, but his or her function is as a messenger from the god, and he or she usually makes threats and promises about the present or the immediate future. Jonah's announcement to Nineveh is typical: "Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!" Jeremiah's prediction that the exile in Babylon would end in seventy years is atypical, as well as arithmetically inaccurate. The Christian claim that Jesus' career was foretold by the prophets is based on some very wild misinterpretations of the prophets. Jesus himself was not a prophet, though the concept of what a prophet was had undergone some historical change since Isaiah and Jeremiah. And I concede, grumpily, that nowadays "predict" and "prophesy" are used interchangeably, even by scholars; but in a discussion of apocalyptic writings and beliefs, it seems to me that they should be distinguished.)

I'm Literally on Fire with the Spirit!

Someone last weekend drew my attention to an article at the Huffington Post, "4 Reasons Not to Read the Bible Literally," by one David Lose, who's written a book on how to read the Bible but doesn't seem to know much about that subject.

Lose begins by expressing his displeasure at the results of a new Gallup Poll which found that 30 percent of its respondents believe that the Christian Bible should be read literally. I thought the poll questions were especially badly designed, blunt instruments that couldn't get much useful information from anyone.

• The Bible is the actual word of God and is to be taken literally, word for word.
• The Bible is the inspired word of God, but not everything in it should be taken literally.
• The Bible is an ancient book of fables, legends, history, and moral precepts.

I suppose, if I'd been asked, I'd have to go with the third option, but I'd have balked at it. But look at the first two: are "actual" and "inspired" the same thing? Why'd they change the adjective? The second option doesn't rule out the third, because the Bible is both ancient and contains fables, legends, history, moral precepts and more. (Neither the letters of Paul nor the Revelation fits into that list.) If it's "inspired," that means Yahweh chose to inspire fables, legends, history, moral precepts and more; not exactly a radical notion. The question for any reader will be how to read and understand that content.

My first reaction to that thirty percent figure, and to the forty-nine percent who answered that the Bible needn't be interpreted literally, was that they were meaningless, because most people don't know what "literally" means. They commonly use it as an intensifier, to mean "totally" or "virtually" or even figuratively. In order to know what those poll numbers mean, you'd have to ask a lot of other probing questions. The one person I've met who claimed to take the whole Bible literally backed down immediately when I asked her about some of the more difficult teachings, like becoming eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven. "I didn't mean you should take it all literally!" she said. I'd bet that a good many of the thirty percent would react exactly the same way.

But Lose immediately jumps to equate "literal" with "inerrant." They're not the same thing, as I've pointed out before; indeed, they're incompatible. In order to maintain the belief that the bible is free from error, the faithful are forced to interpret it very non-literally -- by interpreting the six days of creation as six ages of geologic time, for example, or by arguing that when Jesus said that his disciples must hate their families and their own lives, he was using a semitic idiom that meant "to love less." Modern conservative evangelicals emphatically do not take literally Jesus' teaching that a person who divorces and remarries is committing adultery against the former spouse, or that if their eye lead them to sin they should pluck it out, or that if someone strikes them they should turn the other cheek, or any number of other teachings ascribed by the gospels to Jesus. But then, neither do liberal Christians who think that Jesus was a great moral teacher.

Lose points out that "Most Christians across history have not read the Bible literally." True, but then neither do Christians today. Nor does this mean that their interpretations were necessarily valid, especially if they were developed in the service of inerrancy. "Earlier Christians -- along with almost everyone else who lived prior to the advent of modernity -- simply didn't imagine that for something to be true it had to be factually accurate, a concern only advanced after the Enlightenment." Still, few earlier Christians doubted the factual accuracy of the Bible. The usual way of getting past inconsistencies was to harmonize them, as in the different accounts of Jesus' cleansing of the Temple (discussed by Lose), or the wildly discordant reports of Jesus' appearances to his followers after his resurrection. Believers and scholars alike simply pasted them all together.

Incidentally, a similar attitude prevailed with respect to other authoritative ancient writings. It wasn't until fairly recently that Plato's dialogues began to be read with the same critical eye that the Bible received; even though it was obvious that many elements in them weren't factual, philosophers tended to assume that they were an accurate picture of Socrates and his teaching. The epics of Homer got the same treatment. The writings of competing sects weren't examined critically, just denounced as demonic fabrications. Another approach assumed that the events described in ancient writings really did happen, but over time they had become encrusted with legendary additions, so that human heroes were exalted into gods, and natural events were inflated into supernatural ones in order to impress the credulous.

A similar rationalizing method has been applied, even by conservative scholars, to the miracles of Jesus: he didn't really walk on water, his frightened disciples saw him walking through the surf and misinterpreted what they saw; he didn't really raise the daughter of Jairus from the dead, she was in a coma and just happened to wake up when he came into the room; or Jesus himself didn't rise from the dead, he swooned on the cross and was nursed back to health by Essene healers led by Joseph of Arimathea, who sneaked into his tomb through a clever hidden entrance. And so on.

Lose concludes that literalism "undermines a chief confession of the Bible about God."

Rather than imagine that the Bible was also written by ordinary, fallible people, inerrantists have made the Bible an other-wordly, supernatural document that runs contrary to the biblical affirmation that God chooses ordinary vessels -- "jars of clay," the Apostle Paul calls them -- to bear an extraordinary message. In fact, literalists unwittingly ascribe to the Bible the status of being "fully human and fully divine" that is normally reserved only for Jesus.

Again Lose confuses literalism with inerrancy. I also don't think he's right about inerrantists' view of the biblical writers and characters. The theme of fallible human vessels is the mainstay of many a fundamentalist sermon. It's not the writers, but the guidance of the Holy Spirit that makes the Bible trustworthy for them. But the real trouble with Lose's argument is that he's still basically an inerrantist. Properly interpreted and understood, the Bible on his account offers a "confession about God." To believe that, I suppose, requires "faith."

Lose inadvertently lets the cat out of the bag, though, when he admits that Saint Augustine's acceptance of Christianity was blocked for a long time because of "the notion that Christians took literally stories like that of Jonah spending three days in the belly of a whale. It was not until Ambrose, bishop of Milan, introduced Augustine to allegorical interpretation -- that is, that stories can point metaphorically to spiritual realities rather than historical facts -- that Augustine could contemplate taking the Bible (and those who read it!) seriously." Augustine's mother was a Christian; couldn't she have disabused him of "the notion that Christians took literally stories like that of Jonah spending three days in the belly of a whale"? Maybe it was because many Christians, then as now, did take such stories literally.

And how far are Christians supposed to go with these metaphorical interpretations? One of the selling points and central dogmas of Christianity is that God acted in history, not in myth. The events recounted in the Bible are supposed to have spiritual meaning, but that doesn't mean they didn't (supposedly) happen. So, does David Lose believe that Jesus was literally born to a virgin? And whether he was or not, what "spiritual reality" is pointed to by that story? Ditto for the miraculous feedings of thousands with fish and bread, or the miraculous healings, or walking on water. And what about the death and resurrection of Jesus? Does Lose take those stories literally? As an atheist, I have no doubt that Christians find "spiritual" meanings in the stories of the Bible. But since Christians often disagree about the meanings conveyed by their stories, which ones should I believe?

One of my favorite examples of this problem is the fourth chapter of the gospel of Mark. Jesus tells the parable of the sower to a crowd. After he's done, his disciples ask him privately what it means. Jesus expresses surprise that they don't get it, and explains that he teaches in parables so that "those outside" will not understand what he means, so that they won't repent and won't be saved. He then gives his disciples an allegorical interpretation of the parable: the sower is the preacher, the seed is the preacher's words, the different soils on which the seed falls are the different listeners. That's the secret meaning Jesus wants to keep away from "those outside," and I'm not alone in finding it much ado about nothing much. Jesus' deliberate withholding of understanding, and therefore of salvation, from most people is morally shocking. Matthew gives a different account, and modern scholars do their best to interpret the story so as to make it less offensive. If Jesus had secret teachings about the spiritual significance of his preaching and actions, though, they're lost, and we'll never know what they were; interpreters disagree widely about what it's all supposed to mean.

Another example: I fully agree that the book of Revelation is not to be taken literally. My question is how to understand it on any level, though I'm more interested in what you might call sociological questions. The author strung together his bizarre symbols with angelic interpretations of their meaning, or part of it. By the time the Revelation was written, there was already a tradition of such books, and the angelic guide who explains extravagant visions to a confused human seer is a convention in that tradition. But we know very little, maybe nothing, about what the people who wrote such books thought they were doing. The symbols were readymades, probably even older than the oldest apocalyptic book we have, the book of Daniel. The writers borrowed them and adapted them to the political situation of their own time. We know that while early Christian believers understood that difficult symbolism was involved, they believed that the world was going to change radically, and soon. We know this because of Paul's struggle with his congregations as set forth in his letters, to get them to behave responsibly (keep working, be good citizens) without denying that the End was indeed near.

It's not just because I'm an atheist that I believe that much of the Bible was meant to be taken literally. The writers believed in the Exodus, in David and Solomon's kingdom, in Jesus' miraculous birth and wonderworking career; they also believed that these events had spiritual meaning. I'm just lucky that I don't think anything important hangs on what their meaning is. It's actually serious Bible scholars who are most likely to read the Bible literally, and liberals who are likely to get all the details wrong.

Grasping the Nettle

Sorry I've been so quiet the past week. I actually began a couple of posts that I couldn't seem to finish; let's see if I can do any better tonight.

Easter, like the other big Christian holiday, has to be covered in the media, so it's a good time for all kinds of non-news and general wackiness. A couple of weeks ago the Wall Street Journal gave comedian Ricky Gervais space to explain why he's an "excellent Christian," even though he's an atheist.

I am of course not a good Christian in the sense that I believe that Jesus was half man, half God, but I do believe I am a good Christian compared to a lot of Christians.

It’s not that I don’t believe that the teachings of Jesus wouldn’t make this a better world if they were followed. It’s just that they are rarely followed....

Jesus was a man. (And if you forget all that rubbish about being half God, and believe the non-supernatural acts accredited to him, he was a man whose wise words many other men would still follow.) His message was usually one of forgiveness and kindness.

These are wonderful virtues but I have seen them discarded by many so-called God-fearers when it suits them. They cherry pick from their “rulebook” basically.

Quite a few atheists say such things, but they're generally vague about which teachings of Jesus would make this a better world if they were followed. In Gervais' case, he cherry picks "forgivenness and kindness," which do feature in Jesus' teaching as they do in the teaching of just about every religious teacher except Ayn Rand, but they are surrounded by a lot of stuff that is not so kind or forgiving at all. Hellfire and damnation (you'd better be kind and forgiving, or I'll condemn you to eternal torture!), which make up quite a bit of Jesus' teaching. Or the stuff about plucking out your eye if it leads you to sin, because even a lustful look at a woman will end you up in Hell, or becoming a eunuch for the kingdom of Heaven because marriage, while allowed, isn't a good idea. Or hating your family if they get in the way of your salvation, because the time is short and Judgment is at hand, and Hellfire awaits those who dawdle. Did I mention that the fire is not quenched there, and the worm is not sated? And so on.

Did Gervais grapple with this small issue? No. I can't say I blame him much, because it's one thing to attack Christians (Christians do it all the time), and another thing to attack Jesus. Because Jesus was, like, way cool. So how did Gervais fill out his space in the Wall Street Journal? By going after the Ten Commandments. You know. The Old Testament stuff. It's true that Christians at least pay lip service to the Decalogue, as Jesus did, but there's a whole pile of interesting stuff in the New Testament that is a lot more relevant to Gervais' issues with Christians than the Ten Commandments. According to Wikipedia, for example, Gervais and his girlfriend of twenty-nine years have cohabited without getting married because "there’s no point in us having an actual ceremony before the eyes of God because there is no God"; I think they'd run afoul of Jesus on that one, with his dim view of fornication and all. (And there's also this little thing called civil marriage, which I think they have in England too.)

One reason I have a soft spot for the Noble Engineer Robert A. Heinlein is that he recognized this little obstacle and took a couple of swings at it, most notably for me in Stranger in a Strange Land. In that book his alter ego Jubal Harshaw is having a conversation with another, more naive character about a recently invented religion known as Fosterism. The disciple is outraged by the Fosterite scripture, which she considers just "hateful." Harshaw asks her if she's ever read the holy books of any other religion.

"... I could illustrate my point from the Bible but do not wish to hurt your feelings."

"You won't hurt my feelings."

"Well, I'll use the Old Testament, picking it to pieces doesn't usually upset people as much." [Stranger in a Strange Land, Putnam, 1991, p. 318]

Maybe that was Gervais' motive; but I don't think so. I think he's simply ignorant and dishonest, dodging the hard questions in favor of the easy ones. Or maybe it's just that he has no quarrel with any of Jesus' teachings -- so, Ricky, when are you planning to become a eunuch for the Kingdom of Heaven? Or sell all you have and give to the poor?

But more in the spirit of the season, MSNBC had a couple of winning examples of non-news. This article announced that a perennial biblical difficulty has been solved: the discrepancy between the date of the Last Supper according to the gospel of John, and and the date according to the other three (Matthew, Mark and Luke -- known collectively as the Synoptic gospels). According to Mark, Jesus ate a Passover meal with his disciples, was arrested later that night, and crucified the next day. According to John, Jesus was crucified on the Passover itself. This creates many complications for those who want to treat the gospels as not just history, but eyewitness accounts by Jesus' followers.

Colin Humphreys, a "a metallurgist and materials scientist and a Christian" at Cambridge University, claims to have solved the problem:

Humphreys' research suggests Jesus, and Matthew, Mark and Luke, were using the Pre-Exilic Calendar, which dated from the time of Moses and counted the first day of the new month from the end of the old lunar cycle, while John was referring to the official Jewish calendar of the day.

... With the help of an astronomer, Humphreys reconstructed the Pre-Exilic calendar and placed Passover in the year AD 33, widely accepted as the year of Jesus' crucifixion, on Wednesday April 1.

I am deeply suspicious about this. First, I've seen this explanation before, in scholarship going back to the 1960s at least, so I doubt the originality of Humphreys's "research." Second, as Humphreys says himself, the problem then becomes how to explain how such an inconsistency found its way into texts supposedly written by Jewish followers of Jesus. Why were they using different calendars? (Third, I suppose I'll have to try to find whatever Humphreys is going to publish and see what his evidence is. The gospels are pretty explicit that they're talking about the same calendar.)

There's a famous quip of the distinguished English New Testament scholar Vincent Taylor to the effect that if certain critical scholars were correct, Jesus' original disciples "must have been translated to heaven immediately after the Resurrection," since they supposedly contributed nothing to the gospels as we have them. But Taylor's witticism applies no less to more conservative scholarship, which has to account for the fact that the gospels disagree on so many important matters -- not just the date of the Last Supper, but the Resurrection stories: the gospels disagree almost totally about to whom Jesus appeared, when, and where. If, as Taylor also wrote, "for at least a generation [the disciples] moved among the young Palestinian communities, and through preaching and fellowship their recollections were at the disposal of those who sought information”, it's very hard to explain the discrepancies. ("Difficult?" as Doctor Johnson cried out in another context, "I wish to heaven it were impossible!")

In other non-news, MSNBC reported controversies surrounding the release of some new versions of some English translations of the Bible. "Mary a 'virgin' or a 'young woman?'" asks the title of the page; "Bible edits leave some feeling cross," puns the title of the article. (Well, Christianity is supposed to be the Way of the Cross.) The article contains a lot of minor errors, such as the claim that the new editions are "separate 'official' updated translations of the Christian Bible." One, the New American Bible, could conceivably be called "official," since it's produced by Catholic translators for Catholic readers, but there are other translations produced for Catholics, and the new one "isn't yet approved for use in the Catholic Mass, the bishops conference said, because only the Vatican can grant such approval — a process that can take years."

The other new edition, of the notorious fundamentalist-friendly New International Version, is even less "official." The Southern Baptist Convention adopted earlier editions of the NIV for use in the "pews", but members of other denominations have used it too. According to the article, both the Baptists and many Christian bookstores are unhappy with the new edition, and won't use or stock it. So -- "official", how?

The controversies are also old hat: should 'almah in Isaiah 7:14 be translated as "virgin" or "young woman," a matter of great import for Christians who see the verse as a prophecy of the virgin birth of Jesus. The Revised Standard Version came down on the side of "young woman" fifty years ago, and Jewish translations never went with "virgin." The NIV has come under attack for using "inclusive" language -- that is, mostly inclusivity of gender, as in words like "mankind" or "son" as opposed to "child." There's a lot of room for disagreement in translation of specific cases, since Greek and Hebrew words don't necessarily match English ones. But people who grew up on the archaic King James Version often throw tantrums at any changes made in what they may consider the original Biblical text.

These are, as I said, old controversies, often very old. (How to translate 'almah is as old as Biblical translation, which means a couple thousand years.) But if you're writing the news, you have to come up with something for Easter, I guess.

So, tomorrow's Easter, when Jesus rises from the dead and comes out of his tomb. If he sees his shadow, we get six more weeks of winter, so let's hope for cloudy skies!