Dad Always Liked You Best!

Recently another commenter under a Bart Ehrman video on YouTube told me irritably to read Henri Nouwen's book on the parable of the prodigal son. I don't know what he thought it would prove. The question, if I remember right, was whether Jesus thought that sin had to be atoned for through sacrifice. Ehrman thinks not, and that the material in the gospels which teaches atonement is a later accretion to Jesus' actual teaching. I'm not persuaded, for reasons I'll try to go into some other time, but I kept Nouwen in mind because a gay evangelical Christian article I read a couple of years ago mentioned him as a conciliatory voice on homosexuality and the church. I'd also picked up somewhere indications that Nouwen himself was gay, though closeted. Wikipedia assures us that he never did anything, though.

I didn't try to track down Nouwen's book right away, but one day I was rereading an article by one of my favorite New Testament scholars, Dennis Nineham, rebutting a critique of his work by another scholar.

... Edwards accuses me of ignoring the parable of the prodigal son as evidence for the meaning of Jesus' teaching.  In arguing that the connotations of the word 'father' were different in the time of Jesus from what they are now - a contention with which he seems to agree in his essay on John Bowden - I have, he says, ignored the evidence of the parable.  He must know that a plausible case has recently been made out for questioning whether the parable goes back to Jesus. (See John Drury, The Parables of the Gospels, 1985, which also gives grounds whether the parable of the good Samaritan goes back to Jesus - a question relevant to [Edwards'] p. 194. This book was reviewed by Edwards.)  In any case this is of all parables one of the hardest to interpret; Professor C. F. Evans, for example, has listed a number of conflicting interpretations.  Even if the one Edwards seems implicitly to choose is the right one, it by no means follows that the 'glimpse of home life' it affords is 'typical', or that the teaching of the parable, so interpreted, is 'not untypical' of the teaching of Jesus.  These are simply ipse dixits.*

At this point, let me admit that a plausible case can be made for questioning whether any individual parable goes back to Jesus, though the reverse is also true. Since the person who commended Nouwen's book to me was commenting under a video by a critical scholar who doesn't assume that everything in the gospels goes back to Jesus, however, I think it's fair to bring up the question. Just pointing to one parable that only one of the four gospels contains doesn't settle anything.  That there are numerous conflicting interpretations is also normal in the field; I suspect the other commenter didn't know this and assumed that there could be no question about what the parable means.  Anyway, Nineham's remarks nudged me to find a copy of Nouwen's The Return of the Prodigal Sun and read it.

The parable of the prodigal son is in Luke 15:11-32.  Briefly, a wealthy man's younger son asked to be given his share of his inheritance so he could go and seek his fortune.  Granted his wish, he went away "to a distant country," where he fell into dissipation, drinking and partying with loose women. When his money ran out he had to work tending swine.  Finally he resolved to go home and beg his father to take him in. His father welcomed him and ordered a celebration. His older brother was working in the fields, and no one bothered to tell him of his brother's return.  When he came in he complained, and his father tried to reassure him: "Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours.  But we had to celebrate and rejoice, because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found."  The end.

Now on to Henri Nouwen (1932-1996), a Dutch-born Roman Catholic priest.  I didn't dig deeply into his biography, just looked over his Wikipedia page, so I don't know how he became a celebrity cleric.  He wrote numerous books and traveled widely, taught at Harvard, Yale, the University of Notre Dame. If you're curious, you can find YouTube videos of his rather overwrought preaching style.

The Return of the Prodigal Son, published in 1992, is an odd book. In particular Nouwen focuses more on Rembrandt's painting of that name than on Luke's text. Someone showed him a print of the painting and he became obsessed with it. Eventually in the 1980s he was able to travel to the Soviet Union and see the original in the Hermitage there. Ordinarily tourists weren't supposed to dawdle in front of the painting, but thanks to some personal connections he was allowed to spend several hours looking at it, even getting a chair to sit in.  At this point I began to get annoyed with Nouwen's poor-little-me shtick, as if he was just a nobody who got a special privilege because of his purity of spirit, which the Hermitage guards generously detected. In fact he was a celebrity with an avid support network. Not that there's anything wrong with that!

It's a theme that runs through the book.  The Wikipedia article says that he "was known to suffer from loneliness and a need for interpersonal connection, which he wrote about openly."  Not surprising that it was "known," then, but most people need interpersonal connection.  At one point he writes, "I am the prodigal son every time I search for unconditional love where it cannot be found."  I can't take this very seriously, since he reports many people who gave him unconditional love. It seems to me that Nouwen was one of those people who suffer from what one wise writer called a spiritual vitamin deficiency, and who rebuff the kindness and love they are offered; but it's never enough. I sympathize with him, and recognize that his reactions were out of his conscious control, but the constant whining got tiresome as I read the book.**

Much of Nouwen's discussion of the parable centers around his struggle to make Luke's version agree with Rembrandt's. The painting shows the prodigal on his knees in his father's embrace, while a man who seems to be his brother looks on with displeasure. (There's ongoing debate among art historians and critics about who the different figures in the painting are supposed to represent. Is one woman who looks on impassively supposed to be the mother, for example?)  According to Luke, as I mentioned, the brother was at work in the fields when he showed up, and in fact the father saw the youth coming "while he was still far off," so he ran out to embrace and kiss him. Of course it's not unusual to shift things around when adapting a written story to a visual mode, but Nouwen seems very puzzled by it.  He seems to think that if he tries hard enough he can resolve the differences, but also that the painting takes precedence over Luke's original.

Nouwen seems determined to wring every drop of meaning he can from the parable, on every level, which is a traditional Catholic approach to Scripture.  The most obvious, I think, is the idea that Man has wandered wickedly away from his loving Father in order to wallow in sin, but God is waiting to welcome us back and kill the fatted calf for us if only we'll give up our selfish pride. The idea that God is actively looking for us, like a shepherd looking for a lost sheep, turns up elsewhere in the gospels. Nouwen seems much more interested in individual psychology, though: his obsession with finding unconditional love, his personal reluctance to be enfolded in the Father's embrace, and of course trying to join Luke's story with Rembrandt's painting. The most interesting part of The Return of the Prodigal Son for me was Nouwen's move from the prodigal's perspective to his father's to the elder brother's. I don't think Luke had that possibility in mind, but it's a fair approach.

The elder brother is the fly in the parable's ointment, not just for Nouwen but for most Christian interpreters.  If the point was just that God sits up waiting for us to return to him, it would be simple, but Luke complicates it.  It seems to me that the brother has a valid complaint: not only did his father take him for granted, not showing his love for him, but when the prodigal came home, the father forgot to tell him to hurry in and join the celebration: he let him go on working dutifully in the fields. (Nouwen only notices this as a discrepancy between Luke's version and Rembrandt's.) If he hadn't come back at all, would the father have noticed? Nouwen brushes aside the brother's complaint, as the father does. I don't think it's reading too much into the parable to guess that the prodigal was always the favorite.  In a human father, this would be all-too-human, but since the father represents God, he shouldn't get off as easily: he's neglecting those who love him for those who don't.  There's a parable in Matthew of a wealthy man hiring day laborers, who pays those who worked least the same as those who worked all day.  When those who worked more complain, the boss reminds them that he's the boss and he can do what he likes.  The first will be last, and the last will be first!  True enough, but it's not just or fair, and as even some Christian interpreters have pointed out, good luck with hiring workers tomorrow morning, buddy!

So one of the standard Christian readings of the parable of the prodigal son is that the elder brother represents Israel and the younger brother represents the gentiles who are being grafted into the Kingdom by Christ.  But this also implies that God has deliberately neglected his faithful people, fretting for centuries over the ones who got away. It fits with other of Jesus' reported teachings, such as that as a physician he was needed by the sick, not the healthy. But I thought that the Jews, far from being healthy, were the sickest, a bunch of wicked hypocrites, and therefore needed him at least as much. For Nouwen, as for Christian interpreters generally, it seems that the elder brother should have shut up and accepted his second-best status, grateful that his loving father didn't have him thrown onto the trash heap along with the other sinners.

The strangest of Nouwen's excursions is his claim that

I am touching here the mystery that Jesus himself became the prodigal son for our sake. He left the house of his heavenly Father, came to a foreign country, gave away all that he had, and returned through his cross to his Father’s home. All of this he did, not as a rebellious son, but as the obedient son, sent out to bring home all the lost children of God.

I have no idea where Nouwen got this "mystery."  Jesus in Christian mythology and theology was the willing agent of his Father, not a rebel. But this bit of wackery reminded me that the Jesus of the gospels was a rebellious son to his earthly parents. When, as a boy, he stayed behind in the Temple after Passover (Luke 2:41-52) and his parents found him discussing Torah with the "doctors," Mary told him "Your father and I have been anxiously searching for you."  He retorted that obviously he was "about my Father's business."  That was a slap in their faces.  According to the gospels he continued to reject those who'd raised this cuckoo in their nest, and to teach his followers to hate their parents (Luke 14:26).

Which makes me wonder how this theme relates to the prodigal son. I remember one Christian scholar who speculated that Jesus got his teaching about a loving Heavenly Father from the loving example of Joseph. I speculate that Jesus rejected his parents and invented a loving Heavenly Father who sighed to press him to his bosom and would make him feel as special as he wanted to feel. When he said to call no man father, only your father in heaven, I think he meant it.  Maybe his birth parents weren't so loving - we'll never know.  But sentimental fantasies about his upbringing just don't fit with the stories the gospels tell. (For what it's worth, Nouwen admits that his own earthly father was kind and supportive.)

To recap, the commenter who told me to read Nouwen did so under a Bart Ehrman video where Ehrman rejected the doctrine of atoning sacrifice and assumed that Jesus did too. The prodigal son was relevant because no sacrifice was required (what about the fatted calf, though?), just repentance. Ehrman has gone on to claim that Jesus "hated" atonement.  I wouldn't make too much of this myself.  After all, the gospels also show Jesus forgiving sins without demanding repentance (Mark 2:5ff), and some of the calls for repentance may well be later additions, just as the talk about atonement may be. While Nouwen's interpretations aren't without interest, they don't settle anything, especially since they spring from his personal hangups.

* David Edwards et al., Tradition and Truth: The Challenge of England's Radical Theologians 1962-1989 (Hodder & Stoughton, 1989), p. 298. Ipse dixit, by the way, is Latin for "he said it himself," meaning "an assertion made but not proved."

** As another very wise man once said, "Perhaps what you need ... is a good facial."

A Lot of Explaining to Do

I recently read Rebecca Solnit's new book, Men Explain Things to Me (Haymarket Books, 2014), a collection of essays kicking off with her deservedly famous piece of the same title.  Readers may be surprised that I bought a copy right away, since I've hammered on Solnit more than once in the past (she really ought not to try to write about religion, she gets it wrong every time), but "Men Explain Things to Me" is a powerful, important essay, and the other essays in the book are fine too.  So this time I'm going to quote her with approval and appreciation.

In the essay "Grandmother Spider," Solnit writes:

I think a lot about obliteration.  Or rather that obliteration keeps showing up.  I have a friend whose family tree has been traced back a thousand years, but no women exist on it.  She just discovered that she herself did not exist, but her brothers did.  Her mother did not exist, and nor did her father's mother.  Or her mother's father.  There were no grandmothers.  Fathers have sons and grandsons and so the lineage goes, with the name passed on; the tree branches, and the longer it goes on the more people are missing: sisters, aunts, mothers, grandmothers, great-grandmothers, a vast population made to disappear on paper and in history.  Her family is from India, but this version of lineage is familiar to those of us in the West from the Bible where long lists of begats link fathers to sons.  The crazy fourteen-generation genealogy given in the New Testament's Gospel According to Matthew goes from Abraham to Joseph (without noting that God and not Joseph is supposed to be the father of Jesus) ... Thus coherence -- of patriarchy, of ancestry, of narrative -- is made by erasure and exclusion [70-72].

This is very good, and I hope it will encourage my readers to read the entire essay, and the book.  I still have to quibble, though.  The genealogy of Jesus that opens the gospel of Matthew is not a "fourteen-generation genealogy": it is forty-two generations, divided into three groups of fourteen.  Maybe that's what Solnit meant, but it's not what she wrote.

So let me digress for a moment and have a New Testament scholar, Dennis Nineham, explain things to you*.  Nineham points out "the problem that on the most plausible interpretation of the most likely form of the text as we have it, the third period contains only thirteen names; [but] Matthew clearly intended, or understood it, to contain fourteen" (172).  He goes on to explain that Matthew seems to have gotten the names in his genealogy "from the LXX [i.e., the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible used by the early churches], mainly from I Chronicles 2-3, supplemented by Ruth 4.18 and possibly Haggai 1.1 -- an intelligible enough procedure if you believed, as presumably Matthew did, that the Old Testament was inerrantly accurate on all matters, including matters genealogical" (174).  That covers the first thirty names.  However, "When we come to the last eleven names in the third list, the vital names which specifically link Jesus with the acknowledged kingly line in Israel, we are completely in the dark" (174),

To add to the confusion,

... we may ask: if Matthew drew on the Old Testament because he regarded it as authoritative, how comes it that he felt free to deviate widely from it in the way he does, for example omitting four names from the list it gives and assigning Rahab to a date fully three hundred years later than that to which both the Old Testament and later Jewish tradition unmistakably ascribed her?  It has often been suggested that the absence of the names of three of the kings may simply have been accidental, the result of an error on the part of a copyist; in which case we should presumably have to say that the balanced numerical structure which so impressed the evangelist was fortuitous and factually baseless.  although this suggestion of a scribal mistake is not without plausibility on palaeographical grounds, to suggest that such a symbolic numerical structure was simply the result of an accident surely stretches our credulity rather far, and we may notice that if we accept it, we shall have to suppose that Matthew cared so little about accuracy in factual matters that he did not know, and did not bother to check, whether the numbers he regarded as so significant were really derived from the Old Testament [175].

Speaking of Rahab, she's one reason I don't think Solnit bothered to look at this crazy genealogy before she wrote about it.  One of the other puzzles about Matthew's genealogy (and there are plenty of them, discussed in Nineham's article) is that it includes the names of five women: Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, Bathsheba, and Mary the mother of Jesus.  This makes it anomalous for a biblical genealogy, the exception that proves the rule.  I suppose Solnit was limited for space (though "Grandmother Spider" is pretty long), and discussing the women in Matthew's genealogy would have diverged from the main course of her argument; but given her customary sloppiness when she writes about the Bible I think she simply didn't know about them.

This doesn't affect the point Solnit wanted to make, of course: genealogies, Matthew's included, are meant to bolster someone's authority, and they do so by erasure and exclusion, not to mention invention.  And it happened that a few days after I finished reading Men Explain Things to Me, I read another book that showed the same process of erasing women at work, but this time in evolutionary biology.

The book was Secrets of Life, Secrets of Death: Essays on Language, Gender and Science by Evelyn Fox Keller, published by Routledge in 1992.  By quoting it I run the risk that some of the problems she points to have been corrected in the past twenty years, but from what I see in more recent discussion about science, I doubt it.  And in any case, the 1980s and 1990s were hardly primitive, pre-scientific times; they were a time of scientific triumphalism as defenders of Darwinism contended with "Scientific" Creationists in the courts and in the media, asserting the correctness of their science against pseudoscientific superstition.  In "Language and Ideology in Evolutionary Theory," Keller wrote:

In much of the discourse of evolutionary theory, it is commonplace to speak of the "reproduction of an organism" -- as if reproduction is something an individual organism does, as if an organism makes copies of itself, by itself.  Strictly speaking, of course, such language is appropriate only to asexually reproducing populations because, as every biologist knows, sexually reproducing organisms neither produce copies of themselves, nor produce other organisms by themselves.  It is a striking fact, however, that the language of individual reproduction, including such correlative terms as "an individual's offspring" and "lineage," is used throughout population biology to apply indiscriminately to both sexually and asexually reproducing populations.  Although it would be absurd to suggest that users of such language are actually confused about the nature of reproduction in the organisms they study (for example, calculations of numbers of offspring per organism are always appropriately adjusted to take the mode of reproduction into account), we might nonetheless ask: What functions, both positive and negative, does such manifestly peculiar language serve?  And what consequences does it have for the shape of the theory in which it is embedded? [128-9].

Which individuals reproduce themselves?  For a long time, biologists assumed them to be male on the assumption that "the reproductive contribution of females [provided] the raw materials or nutriments for growth" (130), though that has changed.  Even Darwin, who tended to see natural selection as a process affecting individuals, "was at other times quite explicit in including differential procreation along with survival in his definition of natural selection" (131).  Eventually population genetics tried to solve the problem by focusing on the reproduction of gametes.

In spite of this fact, however, the theoretical (and verbal) convention that subsequently came to prevail in much of the teaching and practice was to equate natural selection with differential survival and ignore fertility altogether.  In other words, the Hardy-Weinberg calculus seems to have actually facilitated not one but two kinds of elision -- first, of all those complications incurred by sex and the contingency of mating that are lost in the representation of reproduction as gametic production, and second, more obliquely, of reproduction in toto [133].

One way of dealing with

the difficulties of sexual reproduction is that of acknowledging sexual difference, and attempting (at least in some contexts) to restrict reproduction to only one sex -- for obvious reasons, usually the females of the species ... This strategy (known in demographic theory as the reproductive dominance of females) would be perfectly adequate were there, in fact, one sex, or alternatively, if neither the attributes nor the availability of males were relevant to the reproductive process, and we furthermore agreed not to inquire too closely about the reproductive fitness of males [138].

Although "rewriting the equations of mathematical ecology for two sexes appears to relatively straightforward" (139), Keller shows that there is a tendency among scientists to resist doing so, and to continue to treat sexual reproduction as if it were asexual.  And twenty-first century evolutionary psychologists continue to treat reproduction, and evolution, as if they were about the reproduction of males, with females either cooperating passively or wickedly obstructing the males' struggle to perpetuate their genes.

*Dennis E. Nineham, "The genealogy in St Matthew's gospel and its significance for the study of the gospels."  Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 58 (1976): 421-444.  As reprinted in Nineham, Explorations in Theology, London: SCM Press, 1977: 166-187.