Thursday, January 29, 2009

From Thing to Sign

In my spare time—of which I have a fair bit since I lost my job at the seminary (well, actually I didn’t lose the job, they closed the seminary, so my job was no longer there to be lost, it simply disappeared, ppfffttt, one fine morning)—anyhow, as I was saying, in my spare time I am writing a book of theology. On this book there also hangs a tale and I will give you a little because it is quite instructive about theology, and perhaps also about me (and that too leads back to theology, I suppose or would like to think). In the past my type of book would probably have been called “systematic theology,” or some attempt at it. That means it takes the various elements of Christian belief and fits them in a coherent pattern or whole with educated thoughts about God, the world and humanity.

I have been trying to write this book for, say, seven years. I had deceived myself on the apparent simplicity of the task and for two reasons. One, my first book got published so quickly and easily. Two, systematic theology is itself a tough thing to take on, and I didn’t actually think I was engaged in that when I set out. My first book, Cross Purposes, was an idea whose time had come. It accompanied other books in the field, just being published, and on a subject many people thought highly important. So, in a phrase, it was snapped up. As for this second enterprise, as I say I didn’t at first realize I was writing systematic theology. I thought the actual world we were living in, its rapid changes, its media stream, its violence, all this was enough “system” for anyone and it was simply a matter of placing Christian belief in that framework. I severely underestimated the conservatism of the traditional Christian worldview and how publishers look to that as the bottom line and do not believe the market can take anything beyond its recognizable borders. When I understood this there then began the ground-busting labor of trying to explain how our present world already represents a shift of meaning and why Christianity is a central agent of that shift. The argument becomes multi-leveled and the writing more dense, and, wait a minute, doesn’t that all sound like “systematic theology”? Uh-huh.

Theology like that is usually written for professionals and while I probably could do that I always wanted to reach a broader audience, in fact the contemporary audience which lives and breathes these changes day by day. I don’t want to give up on this, and while publishers have said my stuff is too sophisticated for the average reader I know that more complex ideas can be accepted when a dominant perspective comes to be shared by reader and author. I am sure that Luther’s arguments on justification were not comprehended by most but his attack on Rome surely was. Nowadays it is not a matter of attacking an institution but of demonstrating a new Christian worldview out of cultural elements that are already in the public space because of Jesus. Once people begin to get hold of this then my kind of systematic theology will get published. (Please say “Amen.”)

So, what might be this shift in meaning that (official) Christianity needs to catch up with? In a nutshell it’s a shift from the thing to the sign. Jesus, we might remember, dealt a lot in signs. But in his time there was almost no media—apart from the head on a coin or a statue (which good Jews would have avoided anyway) there were no visual stimuli beyond nature itself. Today what we call nature is crowded out by a blizzard of images, movies, TV, internet, print, hoardings, cellular phones, screens in offices, in public spaces, etc. etc. This means that our visual or virtual world is progressively more real than the real world. But what is communicated, what is the meaning of all this virtuality? So much of it is frenzy, desire and violence. But Jesus is in there too. Jesus was already a semiotic revolution in his day, leaving signs scattered around like the whole world was his artist’s studio. (Think a piece of bread, and “Here is my body…”) The shift in meaning for Christianity is to pay more attention to the signs of Jesus than to the way we try to fit him into a world of things: viz. ”Is it really his body? Is he really God? Of one substance with God? Is there really a place called heaven, or a place called hell?” Rather, in a world teeming with signs, the signs of Jesus take on their full value. They are an intended transformation of the way we see everything and, therefore, of the way we fundamentally relate to each other. Simple as that.

The dominant signs around us—for example, money, glamour, nation, president, gun—are gradually being eroded and edged out by the sign of the Son of Man, meaning forgiveness, peace, giving, nonretaliation, love, life. It comes down to a contest of signs, and Christian faith is on the frontline of changing the signs by which we live. In the following passage from Colossians it’s as if Jesus overwhelms the system of signs, including its most powerful form, the legal document. And he continues to do so in a vast public act of re-education or counter-meaning. “He forgave us…erasing the record [literally handwriting] that stood against us with its legal demands. He set this aside, nailing it to the cross. He disarmed the rulers and authorities and made a public example of them [literally “exposed them with openness”], triumphing over them in it [i.e. in the public demonstration of counter-meaning].

A public demonstration of counter-meaning. Ah, that sounds like a systematic theology worth googling!

Monday, January 19, 2009

Journey with Jesus #2

Old Testament - Nativity 01/16/09

The Old Testament has many birth narratives – Moses, Samuel (Hannah’s song of praise is the basis for Mary’s Magnificat in Luke), and Joseph, son of Jacob, to name a few. This study focuses on stories surrounding the birth of Isaac (found in Genesis 18:1-15; 19:1-11 & 20:1-7). In Chapter 18 Abraham welcomes the Lord who, with the ambiguity often found in these early stories, appears as three men. The patriarchal narratives – the stories in Genesis before Moses and the exodus – have a more anthropomorphic (human-shaped) description of God.

These stories come out of a specific socio-historical situation - the near east (of Egypt, Mesopotamia and Palestine) 2000 – 1000 BCE. This was a time of city states – often small walled cities ruled by a warrior class – there are thirty one in Palestine alone identified in chapter12 of Joshua. Because of these oppressive city states, in parallel with the great empires, there were many displaced, landless people migrating form one area to another. These people would have been particularly vulnerable, without protection, resources or status. It is some of these landless, rootless people, enslaved in Egypt, that Moses would lead to the Promised Land and give identity as the people of God.

Abraham, Sarah and his nephew Lot are displaced peoples. In Gen 19:9 Lot is described as a stranger by the mob in Sodom. The passage in Chapter 20 where Abraham pretends Sarah is his sister is an example of aliens who have the desperation of the powerless– bartering what they have to survive. In this context hospitality/care for the stranger becomes a matter of life and death. The angels from God (messengers/emissaries - not the Persian winged versions that we think of today) that are protected by Lot in Chapter 19 are another example of vulnerable travelers dependent on the hospitality of strangers. The real sin of Sodom is not the sexual act of the rape of the men – rather it is that they have broken the code of hospitality and protection of the stranger. It is not the sexual sin as such that is at issue– it is the threat of violence to the vulnerable outsider. The fact that they were men indicates only that the sin was greater – men were perceived as more valuable than women.

In this underclass of the dispossessed, women had an even more powerless role. They were the most expendable – bartered and traded . In Genesis, twice Abraham pretends Sarah is his sister (barters her as a prostitute, and in a separate story Isaac does the same thing with his wife). Lot is prepared to sacrifice his daughters to save the lives of the visitors that have fallen under his protection. In this context, women are pawns to preserve or increase the honor/survival of men.

The action of God in these circumstances is to speak for the vulnerable – the widow, the orphan, the stranger. The Exodus was the foundation act – God acting against the mighty of the world on behalf of the powerless. The Torah was a way of trying to say that “you shall not do to others what was once done to you in Egypt”. The subsequent stories of the Old Testament often bear witness to the failure of the people to uphold this Law, but the Torah remained at their center, and the desire was always to return to faithfulness to the Law. But before the Exodus we have the destruction of Sodom as judgment for its offenses against the stranger. Later God tells Abimelech in a dream not to touch Sarah. This is similar to Joseph’s dream in Matthew where the angel urges Joseph to protect Mary and not to cast her out. In the early stories of the Old Testament God acts with violence to bring about justice – it is only as the people experience increasing suffering – the collapse of the kingdoms, the loss of their land and exile – does their understanding of the nature and action of God in the world begin to change. When Mary is mentioned at the end of the three-times-fourteen list of generations in Matthew she stands for all the vulnerable and oppressed women of the Old Testament through whom, paradoxically, God’s purpose will be fulfilled.

Genesis also has the ultimate nativity story – the Creation narratives. In Chapter 1 is the account of the seven days of creation culminating in Ch2:4 “These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created”. “Generations” (geneses) here is the same word used in the following lists of the descendents of Adam and Eve in Chapter 5. Humanity, made in the image of God, also has the ability to generate life. In Matthew 1:1 the Gospel opens with “an account of the generation/birth of Jesus the Messiah”. The same word (genesis: often mistranslated as “genealogy”) is used here. In one sense it means that what follows in the next few chapters is an account of the birth of Jesus – his nativity story. But in a broader sense Matthew is signaling the birth or genesis that Jesus brings into the world. The fourteen generations x3 of the ancestors of Jesus are like the seven days of creation doubled up and then multiplied by the holy number three – a symbol of creation perfected in Jesus. In Jesus we have a new beginning, we are born again—not just as individuals but the whole creation.

Journey with Jesus #1

Here is the summary of the first of our new "Journey with Jesus" Bible studies that took place on January 2nd. Tony has included a short introduction. Peace-Linda


This month we have begun a “Journey with Jesus,” a monthly pattern of prayer and meditation based around a concrete theme in Jesus’ life. The study is not so much about Jesus’ teaching or the theology of a distinct episode but related to some life circumstance which can help us grow closer to Jesus’ experience and person. The Jesus yoga will reflect the theme and meditation, and in the following week we will enter the circumstance more deeply looking at parallels in the Old Testament. Finally we will celebrate our present journey in communion with Jesus through the celebration of a eucharist.


Journey with Jesus – Nativity 01/02/09

Mark and John do not have Nativity narratives. Mark begins with Jesus’ adult ministry, John with his transcendent origins. Matthew and Luke both have infancy narratives but very different – one of the reasons that Biblical scholars do not think that Luke had access to Matthew as a source or vice versa. So why did they write the nativity/infancy narratives? One reason is natural curiosity about origins – people are always interested in who a person’s parents are and where they come from. This is especially true when that person is a great historical figure. In the case of Jesus here was someone who brought a decisive newness into the world through his word, life, death and resurrection. Fifty years later Matthew and Luke were looking for clues in his origins that would signal the radical newness they were experiencing.

Matthew was writing to a Jewish audience. He begins his Gospel with a genealogy (Mt 1:1-16). This idealized list of the ancestors of Jesus is comprised of three groups of fourteen. (Three is a holy number in the Bible and seven is associated with the divine work of creation. Fourteen signals the divine action of creation twice over). The final group does not quite fit – in that there are just thirteen male names – the final name being that of Mary, a woman. Some scholars think that Matthew might have miscounted, or intended that Jeconiah from the previous group was meant to be counted twice. The most natural reading of the text though is to include Mary as the fourteenth name – equal to the men, and a generatioin in her own right.

There are four other women listed in the Matthean genealogy. These are Tamar, Rahab, Ruth and Bathsheba . All four conceived their children in scandalous or at the least dubious circumstances. The text seems to underline this by naming Bathsheba as “the wife of Uriah” – another man’s wife. These four women, all heroines of the Old Testament, were therefore also women with questionable histories. Mary is framed in this way – numbered with the patriarchs but in the company of risqué women.

In MT 1:18 Mary is found to be with child “of the Holy Spirit”. Again in v. 20 Joseph is told by the angel not to be afraid to take Mary as his wife because the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. In the Greek this is more rightly translated as “what is conceived in her is from/out of the Holy Spirit”. The emphasis is on the Holy Spirit and God’s faithfulness rather than on a miracle of parthenogenesis (like that found in Luke). It brings to mind other stories from the Old Testament (for example the birth of Moses) in which God chooses to bring birth out of peril and danger. These stories would have been familiar to Matthew’s Jewish audience.

Luke, in contrast, stresses the miracle. He is writing to a Greek world familiar with stories of gods impregnating human women – for example Zeus in his disguise as a swan or a bull. The mythical/magical events surrounding the conception and birth of great figures was nothing new to the Greek world – Hercules was said to have strangled a snake in his crib dropped by an eagle passing overhead; Alexander the Great was believed to have been born of a woman impregnated by Zeus. In Lk 1:34 Mary makes explicit through her question “How can this be since I am a virgin?” the fact that we are dealing with a physical miracle. The words “the power of the Most High will overshadow you” have subtle echoes of those Greek gods sexual relations with human women. But in Acts (the continuation of Luke’s Gospel) the Holy Spirit is poured out on all flesh – which can be seen as taking the “overshadowed by the Holy Spirit” imagery and magnifying it exponentially.

Mark and John hint that Jesus’ status as a respectable Jew was not totally assured – that there was some irregularity in his background. In Jn 8: 40 the crowds respond to Jesus discussion about their erroneous claim to be Abraham’s children by saying “We were not born of fornication, we have one father, God himself”. Some scholars (e.g. Raymond Brown) suggest that this might be a slur on Jesus’ own parentage (“we, unlike you Jesus, are not illegitimate…”). In Mk 6:3 the people at the synagogue in Nazareth say “Is not this the carpenter the son of Mary?” This would have been an unusual way of stating his background because children were named as sons of their fathers not their mothers. It implies that his father was not known. Jesus does not claim the title “Son of David” for himself. He chooses instead the “Son of Man” appellation from the Book of Daniel. The father Jesus identified with and spoke about was his Father in heaven. It is his relationship with his heavenly father that defines him. If he was in fact illegitimate this would have had a profound impact on his own self-understanding and his relationship with God. It was not in spite of but because of his background that he was able to break free from cultural and religious constraints. Jesus affirmed those who were broken and excluded. He had mercy on the woman caught in adultery. In John’s Gospel Jesus invites us time and again to enter into the relationship he has with his Father.

Jesus’ nativity narratives teach us that God chose as his Messiah someone born in questionable if not disreputable circumstances. Perhaps it is only in these circumstances, when we are forced outside of our places of cultural/social safety, that the Holy Spirit can truly be free to move. Often we do not feel good or holy enough to enter into a relationship with God. Jesus teaches us that it is in fact when we feel the least worthy that we are closest to God and that it is in the times of crisis and scandal in our lives when the Holy Spirit is often most likely to act. Regardless of our own parentage, background or identity, we are all beloved children of the Father.