It seems to me that His Holiness is having a hard time of it as of late.
Apparently, having run out of every other kind of human being to alienate, he’s had to turn against his own once again. I wonder, at what point will ole’ Benny answer the question, “What’s wrong with Catholicism?” with the response, “All those damned Catholics!” or, better yet, “Jesus.”
When he first took office back in 2005, he blamed the pedophile priest scandal on gay men sneaking into seminaries (Benny likes to assume that every gay man is a card-carrying member of NAMBLA). It struck me then that those sounded like awfully strange words, coming from a man in a sequined dress.
Before that, during his days as the head of the Inquisition, he presided over the silencing of Fr. Leonardo Boff, a liberation theologian who dared to suggest that the hierarchy of the church existed in order to empower the laity, not vice versa. For this, Boff was branded as a communist and eventually excommunicated. Galileo is spinning in his grave.
These days, the newest threat to Catholicism comes from another unexpected source: nuns. I can imagine Jon Lovitz in papal regalia, shouting, “That’s the ticket!”
Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times has produced a fabulous column on Papa Benny’s latest witch hunt. Click the link below to read it for yourself:
Drawing from my years of experience working with the mentally ill and chemically dependent, I typically find that one is most insane when you think that you’re just fine and it’s everyone else that’s gone mad.
Having turned the spotlight of accusation on every other Catholic but himself, I think the rhetorical question, “Is the Pope Catholic?” is worth asking.
I found this on Facebook. I can’t tell where it came from or who wrote/drew it. If I find out, I’ll post it in the comments below. But I think it’s absolutely brilliant.
Maybe we’ll get comments from our white-supremacist friends who commented last year? I love reunions…
Back when was in college, I lived in a little town in western North Carolina called Boone. It’s nestled way back in the Blue Ridge Mountains, which form part of the ancient and gentle Appalachians. Once you get up into the High Country of Christmas tree and tobacco farms in the hills around Boone, let me tell you: you will meet some “interesting” people. We had one guy named Joshua who lived in a tent in the woods and sold poetry on the street corner. We had Satanists, Neo-nazis, drug dealers, apocalyptic conspiracy theorists, and fire-breathing preachers galore. Don’t forget: this is the same region of the country that produced snake-handling churches. I think there are even a few folks left in that region who (still) might not have read the memo saying that the Civil War is over.
One such “interesting” person that I had the singular privilege of knowing was a guy named Mike. Mike was a reformed drug user who lived in a trailer way back up in the woods. He attended a particular church that holds the unique belief that theirs is the one and only true church left on planet Earth. All others have either forgotten or corrupted the true gospel of Christ. They believe that strict adherence to the dogmas and morals that constitute the membership requirements for their one, true church is what could secure one’s status as “saved” in the eyes of God.
Mike himself was an intense and energetic loner who felt drawn to their form of religious belief and practice. Their robust conviction and die-hard certainty was attractive to him. However, Mike was a person who struggled in many ways. He wrestled with substance abuse and mental illness. His church, unwilling to bend their strict rules in the name of pastoral sensitivity, was constantly excommunicating him and then readmitting him to membership. Whenever I would bump into him in public, Mike’s customary greeting was, “I got saved again!” Mike believed that his status before God was constantly in a state of flux because of his inability to adhere to his church’s code of faith and conduct. That inflexible code, I think, only served to increase Mike’s anxiety and make him feel alienated from the Source of life and love that could truly help him on his quest to become a better person and a more faithful Christian.
Now, I don’t think many of us are likely to find ourselves in Mike’s position. While we too might very well wrestle with problems like addiction and mental illness, this church does not exclude or condemn people for being human. However, we do live in a time when it is quite likely that you will encounter someone (in person, online, or on TV) who will try to send you the message that you’re not “saved” or “born again,” which is to say that you don’t count as a “real” Christian or a child of God. Let me tell you right now that I think that’s a bunch of baloney.
In the interest of full-disclosure, I should probably take this opportunity to also tell you flat-out that I am a universalist. What that means in theological terms is that I believe in the doctrine of universal salvation. What it means in plain English is that I don’t believe in hell. I find the idea of eternal punishment after death to be completely incompatible with the nature and purposes of the God of Love who is revealed to us in the person of Jesus Christ. This means that I believe everyone, everywhere, regardless of their religion or their behavior, is “saved.” I’m going to come back to this point later, but I think it’s important that I lay it out now, just so you all know where I’m coming from and where I’m going with this.
Those who try to draw lines in the sand between us and them (i.e. the saved and the damned, the religious insiders and the secular outsiders), typically do so using one or both of the following criteria: belief and behavior. They might say that there are certain ideas you need to accept before you’ll count as a “real” Christian in God’s eyes. They might also say that there are certain things that you need to do if you want to be “saved.”
Folks like this have been around for a long time. In fact, I think it’s probably fair to say they’ve been around for as long as organized religion has been part of human society. We can definitely see their tendencies emerging within the pages of the Bible itself.
In the earliest decades of Christianity, there were two influential groups that developed within the church, each with its own ideas and ideologies. The first group is now known as the Judaizers. These were folks who had a very high degree of respect for Christianity’s roots in Jewish religion and culture. So great was their love for this heritage that many of them began to insist that every new Christian should become Jewish first. They thought this would limit the amount of cultural perversion and assimilation that might happen among Christians. The Judaizers insisted that Christian believers of all ethnicities should make certain that they follow all 613 of God’s commandments in the Jewish Torah. The leaders of the early church, however, decided together that the doors of the church should be flung as wide open as possible in order to welcome people from every tribe, language, people, and nation into the community of Christ. Christianity’s honored roots may have been Jewish, they said, but its future would be international and multicultural. You can read about the details of this conversation in chapter 15 of the book of Acts in the New Testament. The apostle Paul confronted this controversy head-on in his Epistle to the Galatians (also in the New Testament). He had a lot of passionate things to say about it (he was against the Judaizers). Even though the issue seems to have died down in the later part of the first century, we can still hear echoes of that conflict in today’s reading from John’s First Epistle. John’s words about “obey[ing] the commandments” may well have been a reference back to the controversy with the Judaizers. With their strict emphasis on following the commandments, one can easily see how the Judaizers were the ones who said that there are certain things that people need to do in order to count as “saved” in God’s eyes. We could say that they believed in self-salvation through behavior.
The second influential group in the early Christian church was actually a collection or series of different groups that had common characteristics. Collectively, they are now known as the Gnostics. These were folks who came into their Christian faith from the Greco-Roman side of the equation. They brought with them a love of philosophy and wisdom as part of their cultural heritage. As they began to explore their newfound Christian faith, they tried their best to understand Christianity through the lens of philosophy. Popular philosophical thought at the time saw the physical world as completely evil and the spiritual world as completely good. The Gnostics saw Jesus as a kind of divine messenger who floated down to earth and appeared to take on human form in order to teach humanity the secret knowledge that would allow them to transcend above the realm of the physical and enter the spiritual realm, where God lives. The early church leaders, especially the author of John’s First Epistle, were extremely uncomfortable with the idea that this world is totally evil and Jesus wasn’t a real flesh and blood human like you or me. With their emphasis on “secret knowledge” as the source for salvation, the Gnostics were like those who insist that a person has to accept certain ideas or interpretations of scripture in order to count as a “real” Christian. We could say that they believed in self-salvation through belief.
Now John, writing as a pastor to his congregation in his First Epistle, challenges both of these false assumptions, but he spends a lot more time being concerned about the Gnostics (probably because that was the bigger issue with this congregation).
John counters these ideas with one, huge, over-arching principle that trumps both belief and behavior: Love.
John is the writer who famously wrote, “God is love.” God’s love, given freely and unconditionally to those who neither deserve nor earn it, is the basis of all authentic Christian faith and action. Another word for this kind of unconditional love is “grace.” That’s what we mean when we sing, “Amazing grace! How sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me!” The Protestant Reformers, our forbears in this church, were following in John’s footsteps when they leaned heavily on the principle of sola gratia or “grace alone” as one of the central foundations of their faith. In theological terms, grace is the “unmerited favor” of God. In plain English, it means “God loves you and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
For John, the Protestant Reformers, and all of us in this church, the primary revelation of God’s love is in the person of Jesus Christ. Jesus embodied love. He lived and died for others. He set for us an example of what love looks like and what the power of love can do in this world.
According to John, the only way to respond to this free gift of unconditional love is to give love freely and unconditionally. When we love like Jesus, we remind ourselves and others that love is the Ground of our Being. Love is the heartbeat at the center of the universe. When we love like Jesus, our hearts beat in time with the cosmos.
Love is so much simpler, yet so much more difficult, than following a list of prescribed beliefs and behaviors. We would much rather have an itemized creed to which we demanded adherence from everyone. That’s way easier than loving. We would much rather have a code of conduct that spelled out every possible contingency and application for each regulation. That’s way easier than loving.
Love is a fluid and unpredictable thing. Love keeps us creative and flexible. Love is difficult, but it’s also so sorely needed.
You and I live in a society where dogmatism and litigiousness run rampant, but real love and community are on the decline. Just as the Beatles found out that “money can’t buy me love,” we’re finding out that we can’t legislate it either. It would be so much easier to simply draw our lines in the sand over belief and behavior, keeping us in and them out.
The one thing that’s lacking in this land is a sense of love and community. People are longing to belong.
In spite of our exponentially accelerated rate of communication and information exchange in our culture, folks are feeling more isolated than ever. This is a time when the recovery of love as our central principle for faith and action is needed more than ever.
Because of this great need in the world and the great love that is in us as the people of God, I am ordaining and commissioning you all this morning as evangelists and missionaries of love to Central New York and the North Country. I’m not asking you to go proselytize your neighbors or try to win converts at the grocery store. There are enough folks out there doing that already.
At best, those “missionaries” and “evangelists” are only trying to get people to “believe that” certain ideas about Jesus are true (i.e. that he is the Son of God who was born of a virgin, died on the cross, and rose from the grave). Those pamphlets of religious literature can never really get people to “believe in” Jesus in a real way.
I can say “I believe that” about any number of facts. I believe that I am standing in a pulpit right now. I believe that there is a stack of paper in front of me. I believe that I can see our organist from here. All of those are simple statements of fact.
But to say “I believe in” takes a much more personal commitment. I believe in this church. I believe in you. It’s a statement of personal trust and relationship. It goes way farther than simply giving intellectual assent to a list of statements on a piece of paper.
Into this isolated and isolating world that knows so little of real love, I want to send you all as evangelists and missionaries of unconditional love in word and action. Show your faith in love through loving deeds, not creeds. Help people to believe in that love which we hold most sacred.
I commission you in the words of another, more famous, American Universalist named John Murray, who preached during the 1700s:
Go out into the highways and by-ways. Give the people something of your new vision. You may possess only a small light, but uncover it, let it shine, use it in order to bring more light and understanding to the hearts and minds of men and women. Give them not Hell, but hope and courage. Do not push them deeper into their theological despair, but preach the kindness and everlasting love of God.
Fascinating thoughts on pluralism by philosopher John Hick.
Warning: Liberal warm fuzzies ahead. If you don’t want those, feel free to stop reading now.
The future I am thinking of is accordingly one in which what we now call the different religions will constitute the past history of different emphases and variations within a global religious life. I do not mean that all men everywhere will be overtly religious, any more than they are today. I mean rather that the discoveries now taking place by men of different faiths of central common ground, hitherto largely concealed by the variety of cultural forms in which it was expressed, may eventually render obsolete the sense of belonging to rival ideological communities. Not that all religious men will think alike, or worship in the same way or experience the divine identically. On the contrary, so long as there is a rich variety of human cultures—and let us hope there will always be this-we should expect there to be correspondingly different forms of religious cult, ritual and organization, conceptualized in different theological doctrines. And so long as there is a wide spectrum of human psychological types—and again let us hope that there will always be this—we should expect there to be correspondingly different emphases between, for example, the sense of the divine as just and as merciful, between karma and bhakti; or between worship as formal and communal and worship as free and personal. Thus we may expect the different world faiths to continue as religio-cultural phenomena, though phenomena which are increasingly influencing one another’s development. The relation between them will then perhaps be somewhat like that now obtaining between the different denominations of Christianity in Europe or the United States. That is to say, there will in most countries be a dominant religious tradition, with other traditions present in varying strengths, but with considerable awareness on all hands of what they have in common; with some degree of osmosis of membership through their institutional walls; with a large degree of practical cooperation; and even conceivably with some interchange of ministry.
Beyond this the ultimate unity of faiths will be an eschatological unity in which each is both fulfilled and transcended—fulfilled in so far as it is true, transcended in so far as it is less than the whole truth. And indeed even such fulfilling must be a transcending; for the function of a religion is to bring us to a right relationship with the ultimate divine reality, to awareness of our true nature and our place in the Whole, into the presence of God. In the eternal life there is no longer any place for religions; the pilgrim has no need of a way after he has finally arrived. In St. John’s vision of the heavenly city at the end of our Christian scriptures it is said that there is no temple—no Christian church or chapel, no Jewish synagogue, no Hindu or Buddhist temple, no Muslim mosque, no Sikh Gurdwara. . . . For all these exist in time, as ways through time to eternity.
I’ve reminded myself once again of the dangers of blogging in a pre-caffeinated state of mind. Something strikes you as funny and insightful, but then you look at it later and go, “Why did I think that was a good idea?”
Early this morning, I posted a picture from Facebook that defines Homophobia as “the fear that gay men will treat you the way you treat women.” That was seriously not cool of me.
In a much-read blog post from last week, I wrote that people of all ideological stripes should be conducting their conversations about this issue “in a spirit that is consistent with our highest shared values.” Posting that image was not consistent with those values. Nobody called me on it or prompted me to write this. It’s just one of those moments for honest self-reflection and confession.
I want to appeal to the best in all of us, not the worst.
The picture made me chuckle a little when I first read it because I agree that our society’s historic prejudice against LGBT people is ultimately rooted in our longstanding degradation of women. Hence, we attach hurtful labels like “butch” and “sissy” to those people who don’t conform to our culturally-formed preconceived notions about gender roles and behavior. In that sense, the picture makes a point. But I think there might be ways of communicating that truth that don’t resort to bumpersticker slogans and uncivil language that continues to lower the bar of mutual degradation.
So, with all of this in mind, I’d like to offer another definition of the term Homophobia.
Literally speaking, phobia means “fear” and homo means “same.” Hence, I would define homophobia as “fear of the same.” Beneath the labels by which we identify, the categories by which we organize, and the shibboleths by which we exclude one another, we are all humans who have to share this planet. Last night, I was listening to a sermon by Desmond Tutu where he proclaims that we are all “God-bearers.” He asks the congregation repeatedly, “What if we really believed that?!”
This, the deepest truth about us as beings, is common to all in equal portions. As we draw up our ideological battle lines and develop our conservative/liberal conspiracy theories out of this demonic paranoia, we are all bowing down to the spirit of homophobia: fear of the same. We are choosing to fear those who are fundamentally the same as us: fellow children of God and co-bearers of the divine image.
We can do better than that. I can do better than that. I want to do better than that.
Today marks the end of a series of blog posts called Evangelical Lessons for Liberal Christians.
I’ve been looking at some of the things that evangelicals do really well and exploring some of the ways in which liberal Christians might benefit by taking seriously the gifts of our evangelical cousins. Life has been pretty rough as of late in the mainline Protestant churches. Battle lines have been drawn between evangelicals and liberals and the armies are loading and aiming. In some sections, shots have already been fired from both sides. I’m beginning to feel a bit like Prince Arjuna in the Bhagavad-Gita: parking my chariot between the two armies and imagining that there must be a better way than war. Perhaps that’s not the best analogy to use since, in the Bhagavad-Gita, Krishna ultimately advises Arjuna to fight and kill. Well, with all due respect to Krishna, maybe I’ll get better advice if I imagine Jesus with me in the chariot.
My colleagues tell me that they expect this summer’s General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church to be a bloodbath. I’m hoping that’s not necessarily the case. With blog posts like these, I’m hoping that we might be able to foster the growth of a more generous spirit within liberals and evangelicals alike. Perhaps, as it was for Arjuna, the end result will be the same, but maybe we can change the spirit of the split, so that the seeds of future reconciliation might be sown today.
Enough of that for now. This series isn’t about denominational schism. It’s about those qualities of evangelicals that liberal Christians can and ought to appreciate and imitate. Let’s get to it, shall we?
In the first installment, God Has No Grandchildren, we looked at the ways in which evangelicals do such a great job of taking personal ownership of their spirituality (a.k.a. their relationship with God). In the second post, Romancing The Book, we looked at the evangelical passion for the Bible. In this final chapter, I want to talk about the evangelical commitment to mission and what liberal Christians can learn from it.
In many ways, mission is at the very heart of what it means to be evangelical. The name evangelical comes from the Greek word euangelion, which means, “Good news.” Evangelicals are all about announcing good news to the world.
They tend to mobilize quickly and effectively using grassroots techniques. Evangelicals were the ones, primarily through the Baptists and Methodists, who most effectively brought Christianity to the American frontier during the periods of colonialism and westward expansion. During the 19th and 20th centuries, they spearheaded international missionary efforts to Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In fact, evangelicals did such a good job at this that the churches they started a century ago are now sending missionaries back to North America and Europe to “re-evangelize” our increasingly secular societies.
Take my own denominational tradition (Presbyterianism) as an example. We have our historical roots in Scotland but, numerically speaking, the Presbyterian Church of East Africa has about twice the membership of the Presbyterian Church (USA) and more than eight times the membership of the Church of Scotland. The world’s largest Presbyterian congregation (Myungsung Presbyterian Church) is located in Seoul, South Korea. Say what you will about evangelicals, they know how to get things done!
Liberal Christians, on the other hand, have a tendency to be more self-critical, inward-focused, and reliant upon institutional infrastructure. The one thing that we constantly seem to forget is that the church is ever only one generation away from extinction. A church is never so well-established in a community that it can excuse itself from putting faith into action outside its own walls.
When liberal Christians talk about “doing mission,” they usually mean supporting various nonprofit organizations that do good work in a community. If you were to look at the various projects supported by the mission committee at my congregation, only one is operated in-house. Another was started by a former-pastor, but is now run by folks from other churches. Most of the time, they send money to other agencies. Don’t get me wrong, that’s a good thing. These agencies desperately need the support. Last winter, a low-income daycare provider in our county would have shut down or reduced services if it had not been for the last-minute financial support of congregations like ours. However, I worry about us when we limit our sense of “mission” to just giving money to nonprofit service agencies. I would like to see us also donating our time and talents to these groups.
Let our churches develop a reputation for the kind of hands-on care that made Jesus and the early Christians (in)famous. The Roman emperor Julian complained to the pagan high priest of Galatia that these “impious” Christians were winning converts because of the way they cared for the poor. This was particularly true during times of plague, when Christians would risk their lives by staying in the infected cities to treat the ill and bury the dead, regardless of religious affiliation.
St. Lawrence the Deacon, when ordered to turn over “the treasures of the church” to government officials, emptied the church coffers into the street and then gathered the poor and destitute together in front of the governor’s office saying, “Behold, the treasures of the church!”
Doesn’t this provide a stellar model for socially engaged, grassroots ministry among liberal Christians? We come to the mission field with a sense of self-awareness, cultural sensitivity, and respect for pluralism. At our very best moments, our acts of service and justice preach silent sermons to the lost souls of this world who are looking for a place to belong. In times more recent than those of Julian and Lawrence, pastors such as Walter Rauschenbusch (early 20th century Baptist) have found their social consciousness awakening as they serve churches in communities like Hell’s Kitchen in New York. The Social Gospel movement, of which Rauschenbusch was an early leader, is responsible for many blessings that we now take for granted: child labor laws, workplace safety regulations, weekends, paid vacation, retirement and healthcare benefits, and minimum wage, just to name a few. Later in the same century, Martin Luther King led his prophetic grassroots campaign against racism, poverty, and militarism. Dorothy Day and the Berrigan brothers led activist campaigns for labor rights, racial equality, and nuclear disarmament. The Catholic Worker movement, which they founded and supported, now has houses of hospitality in almost every major city in the United States. When liberal Christians get engaged in mission, we do it well.
Even though we don’t tend to go out with gospel tracts and religious sales pitches for “winning souls,” I consider these efforts of liberal Christians to constitute an effective witness for Christ. People are drawn to communities with open hearts, open minds, open arms, and open doors. In our individualist and increasingly isolated North American society, people are looking for belonging more than believing. They are attracted to churches that make a difference in this world. They want a spiritual community where they can feel welcomed and get involved in something that really matters.
That’s where folks are most likely to discover for themselves that God is real and Jesus is worth following.
We liberal Christians need to get a clue from our evangelical brothers and sisters. We need to get out of our pews and into the streets to share some good news in word and deed. The only way to save our lovely churches is to get outside of them. So, let’s get out there are let people know who we are and where we’re from. Speak up and act out in the name of your faith!
Just as the disciples left their nets in the boat to follow Jesus, leave your capital campaigns, steeple restoration projects, stained-glass windows, pipe organs, and hymnals. Take to the streets again!
The fact that the word “evangelical” means “good news” doesn’t mean that liberal Christians don’t have good news to proclaim as well. We do. In the same way, the fact that the word “liberal” means “freedom” doesn’t mean that evangelicals don’t value freedom of heart and mind. They do.
Some folks wonder why I’ve decided to be so intentional about using the loaded terms “evangelical” and “liberal.” Many think we should do away with labels and categories altogether. I’m not convinced that’s such a good thing. First of all, it’s just plain inaccurate. We have two very distinct versions of Christianity that are currently coexisting in our mainline churches. We’ve got to call them something, otherwise we won’t have an accurate picture of who we really are. The various attempts to hold “the middle ground” seem to have resulted in an amorphous and watery theology that fails to challenge or inspire anyone. Rather than eliminating our theological categories, why don’t we be honest about our diversity and focus instead on how our camps are relating to one another?
I don’t want to meet evangelicals on “the middle ground.” I want to be a liberal Christian who respects evangelicals and makes room for them to be who they are and do what they feel called to do, so long as we get to do the same. I hope this series of blog posts has contributed to making that dream a reality.
This was a video that I meant to include in the previous post, Romancing the Book: Evangelical Lessons for Liberal Christians.
It was produced by Fr. Matthew Moretz, an Episcopal priest and classmate of my wife’s at Davidson College. He does a great job of discussing the Bible in this installment of his enlightening and hilarious series: Fr. Matthew Presents…
This is part 2 of 3 in a series of posts called Evangelical Lessons for Liberal Christians. Evangelicals, much maligned among liberals, nonetheless possess an impressive array of gifts and skills that can benefit the larger Christian community, including those who do not share their beliefs and biases. Liberal Christians are so quick to self-identify as “not evangelical” or “not that kind of Christian” that we have developed a nasty habit of tossing babies out with the bathwater. I’m suggesting that we all go outside and recover these babies from the muddy ground outside (although we may have to give them another bath before we bring them back into our house).
Wow… I’m really stretching that metaphor.
In my first post, entitled God Has No Grandchildren, we talked about how evangelicals have done an amazing job of taking personal ownership of their spiritual lives. For them, Christianity is not a set of dogmas, morals, and rituals to which one defaults by accident of birth. For them, it is a whole-hearted commitment of one’s self to an ongoing relationship with the divine.
In today’s post, I want to talk about the Bible.
As far as religious communities go, none have had a more passionate love affair with the Bible than have evangelicals. They tend to take it with them wherever they go: church, work, school, and vacation. They sometimes refer to it as their sword (a source of strength) and other times as their love letter from God. Most of the time, they simply call it the Word of God. They have confidence that the voice of the Holy Spirit is able to reach, comfort, and guide them through these words on a page. Like newlyweds in the bedroom, evangelical encounters with the Bible are intense and frequent (if a bit messy and awkward). They tend to devour it, even though they don’t understand much of what they’re reading.
Liberal Christians, on the other hand, tend to relate to the Bible like an older couple in a long-term relationship. In place of the young lovers’ passion, they have developed a deep respect for its mystery and complexity. They let those old, familiar words wash over them and anchor them to all time and eternity. There are still some things they don’t like about the Bible, but they’ve learned how to accept those things and still appreciate the Bible for what it is.
Liberal Christians, while they tacitly accept the appellation “Word of God” as applied to the Bible, tend to cringe at notions of inerrancy and infallibility. For us, the Bible is not a magical book that was somehow “beamed down” from heaven without flaw or error. Why then do we still refer to them as the Word of God? I love the answer given in the Catechism found in the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer (1979):
We call them (the Holy Scriptures) the Word of God because God inspired their human authors and because God still speaks to us through the Bible.
I love this answer’s dual emphasis on inspiration and continual speaking. Liberal Christians believe that the divine Word is speaks to us “in, with, and under” (a phrase I’m borrowing from Luther’s sacramental theology) the human words on the page. For those of us in the Reformed (and always reforming) tradition of Protestant Christianity, we identify Christ as the true and Living Word of God. The scriptures, as we have them, constitute a witness to that Living Word. In other words, the early disciples experienced something extraordinary in the person of Christ and spend the rest of their lives wrestling with what it meant. The Christian churches have continued to wrestle with that mystery for almost two millennia. These days, we are less certain than ever about our particular answers, but more convinced than ever about the overall importance of what we’ve found.
In our less glorious moments, liberal Christians have tended to abandon this treasure of the faith to those who would abuse it and co-opt it for their own selfish ends. Our respect for the complexity and mystery of the Bible has sometimes led us to throw our hands up in despair that anyone could ever know what this crazy book is talking about. We despise trite and easy answers taken from text on a page, which leads us to sometimes give up hope of finding any guidance at all. In our very worst moments, we tend to cut and paste the parts we like and throw out or ignore the parts we don’t. My favorite example of this kind of project is the famous Bible produced by my American forbear, Thomas Jefferson. He didn’t like the idea of supernatural miracles, so he just cut those parts out. These days, many liberal Christians have a tendency to cut out the parts about judgment and sex, as if the Bible had nothing valuable to say about these topics. To be fair, many evangelicals do the same thing. They underline their favorite verses about individual salvation and “the pelvic issues” while they ignore the passages that emphasize the importance of social justice or suggest the possibility of universal salvation.
The tendency toward idolatry is a human universal, not unique to evangelicals or liberals. We all have an instinctual urge to recast Jesus as an advocate for our own personal ideology. We all tend to hear our own voices, rather than God’s speaking to us in the text of the Bible. Anne Lamott once wrote, “You can safely assume that you’ve made God in your own image when she hates all the same people you do.”
I was speaking with a colleague once at a pastor’s retreat on Christian spirituality. I was talking about the central role that the Bible plays in shaping our spirituality. He asked, “Does it have to be through the Bible?” I responded that it doesn’t have to be through the Bible, but it gets to be. As Christians, we have the privilege of conducting our collective faith-journey in dialogue with this cacophonous chorus of voices from the past. I see the Bible as a library, rather than a book. It’s a messy collection of stories, poems, and letters that chronicle our ancestors’ relationship with God. They stretched to describe the indescribable. They failed to capture the essence of the divine in their writings, but they did leave a number of helpful signposts. I love the scriptures for their messiness. It gives me hope for myself. God never gave up on Abraham, Israel, or Peter, so I have every reason to trust that God will not give up on me.
The exercise that has most helped me recover the Bible as a tool for my spiritual growth is a practice developed by monks over a thousand years ago. It’s called Lectio Divina, which is Latin for “Divine Reading.” Here’s how it works:
Sit down with a short passage of scripture (e.g. Jesus’ parable of the Prodigal Son in Luke 15). Read it slowly. Out loud, if you can. Maybe even stopping at every verse or sentence.
Pay attention to any words or phrases that “jump out at you” or seem to touch your life in some significant way.
Take a moment to process what that word or phrase means to you right now, in this moment. You’re not looking for once-and-for-all absolutely authoritative interpretations. You’re listening for what God is saying to you today through this passage. God might be saying something completely different to someone else through those same words. God might say something completely different to you tomorrow through those same words. The Spirit blows where it wills…
Craft a prayer of response to what you think you’ve heard. This can be a prayer of thanksgiving, a request for help, or a dedication of oneself to service.
Sit still for a period of extended silence while you contemplate God’s presence within and around you. It might help to focus your attention on the normally unconscious act of your breathing or perhaps pick a special word to guide and focus your meditation.
Close by reading the passage slowly once more. Be thankful for what you have encountered in this process.
I think that liberal Christians have an opportunity to re-engage with the Bible in a passionate way. We can begin our “second honeymoon” with this old partner and rekindle in ourselves the romance we admire in our evangelical brothers and sisters.
It seems to me that His Holiness is having a hard time of it as of late.
