Money, Fame, and Power.

Right after his baptism, Jesus goes into the wilderness where he is tempted by the devil.  The devil makes him 3 offers.  One is to turn stones into bread so he could eat.  Another is that he throw himself spectacularly off the top of the Temple, forcing God to send angels to very publicly rescue him.  The last (and they are in a different order in Matthew and Luke), was that he be given ultimate secular power over the nations, that is, be King of the World.

Generalizing “bread" to mean wealth, Jesus pointedly rejects 3 things: money, fame, and power.

These are 3 things we are all taught to pursue all our lives.  They constitute the basis of our whole economy.  We measure our success in life in terms of these 3 categories.  They are what our parents wish for us.  They are what we crave and strive for.

But Jesus insists that to set our lives on these things is toxic.  They are offered to him by the devil, the “father of lies,” the malevolent entity who desires to void Jesus’ messiahship.  Having been unsuccessful at defeating God, his agenda now is to annihilate God’s creation, using humans to do it.  He tempts Jesus with what he tempts all of us: to focus on ourselves, our personal needs and desires, our personal strategies, and even our wish to accomplish good.  The Lord’s rejection of them demonstrates his realization of his Essence as Son of God.  Discipleship means following his example in rejecting these three influences in our lives. 

We cannot continue to pursue money, fame, and power, and also follow Jesus.  Jesus will later say explicitly that we cannot at the same time serve God and money.  To follow Jesus is to stop working for these things and to seek first God’s Kingdom.  Seeking God’s Kingdom begins when we renounce money, fame, and power.  Indeed, this reorientation is the meaning of the repentance that is the beginning of discipleship.  Money, fame, and power are what repentance turns away from.  This turning towards God’s Kingdom is the new mind, the new way of thinking and acting, which is what repentance is about.

Jesus himself goes through his mortal life basically poor, anonymous, and powerless.  He appears to own almost nothing beyond the clothes on his back; he never does anything for money.  While he became perhaps the most famous human in history, he did not pursue fame and was always telling his followers to keep his true identity a secret while he was with them.  And while he exercised power in terms of healing and supernatural events, he rejects the kind of coercive, violent, legal, State power the devil offers.

What does this mean for those of us who are called to be his disciples?  I suspect we need to reexamine our own relationships to these categories and move into living a more simple, anonymous, and powerless life. 

I will explore at what this might look like in future posts.

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Pizza and the Bible, or What Is Authentic?

We have this bias in the Modern world that what is most authentic and true is what is determined to be the oldest.  

We see this in biblical studies, where scholars seek to identify the most original, oldest version of a text.  In my Greek New Testament, the apparatus at the bottom of the page gives a rating of different textual variants, based on how original/old a word or passage is judged to be.  

In most translations of the Bible, a board of scholars makes an assessment about which ancient texts are the oldest and makes that the basis for the main text.  Other choices get demoted to the footnotes.  (You can read about the criteria they used for their decisions in the Preface at the very beginning of most Bibles, which almost no one ever reads.)

Implicit (at least) in this approach is an assessment that changes to the text judged to have been made later are less authentic.  They may even be considered corruptions of the more pure original.  Sometimes these are scribal errors.  Sometimes they are embellishments or clarifications.  But often they are viewed as deliberate, conspiratorial, perfidious, and malicious attempts to twist the text for political or other reasons.

The problem here is that, in order to identify the oldest version of a text, scholars have to apply various methodologies and criteria, which themselves carry often unexamined assumptions rooted in the biases and prejudices of post-Enlightenment philosophy and science.  The “older-is-more- authentic-and-therefore-better” assumption is one of these.  Another is “we can determine what is older by the application of our methodology.”  

But of course, they can’t.  What they give us is an educated guess based on what their tools are designed to ascertain.  Then they proclaim this to be “older.”  And sometimes the evidence is obvious.  For instance, if a 2nd century theologian quoted a verse from the gospels, then we know that that verse is at least that old.  But for the majority of textual variants, the evidence is nowhere near that conclusive, and scholars have to make inferences and posit hypotheses.

But here’s the thing: Any complete text translators settle on never actually existed.  There is no complete ancient manuscript that matches the current critical text.  It is a hodgepodge of pieces deemed older than other pieces; but there was never a text that had all the same pieces.    

Therefore, I want to challenge this whole thing.  I suggest that the “authentic” is not necessarily what is assessed to be “oldest,” but what is received in an ongoing process of historical/contextual development.  That development includes the product of the application of Modern scientific tools… but this is but one of many contemporary expressions of the text, developed to meet some contemporary needs.  

Here’s an analogy: What is “authentic pizza”?  In one view, authentic pizza might be the version culinary historians determine to have been invented by some original baker, probably somewhere in Italy, perhaps hundreds of years ago.  It would be interesting.  But would it be the pizza that people would order on Friday night?  Does that matter?  

    

Was pizza horribly defiled and unconscionably corrupted when someone added a topping?  No.  (Not even pineapple….)  It was simply subject to a living process of continual development within a community of people who loved pizza.  I personally believe that perfection was attained with thin crust New York pizza; I object to adding anything more exotic than pepperoni.  But I am willing to accept other pizza lovers, even if they prefer the Chicago deep-dish version. 

Like pizza, the Bible belongs to a continuing community.  It is a living text, not a dead artifact to be theorized about and presented in some pristine, preserved condition.  Things that are alive change and develop; they maintain a balance between continuity and adaptation.  Caterpillars become butterflies, not motorcycles.  A some point pizza stops being pizza and becomes a salad or a casserole or whatever. 

The development of the biblical text within the community of people who loved and followed Jesus was not necessarily adulteration, corruption, or defilement; it is what happens when a community authentically grapples with and applies a text to its own situation and time.  Maybe it is precisely something that has been cooked, spiced, contextualized, added to, commented upon, used, improved, and expanded, in, through, and by a faithful community over time, that is most authentic.

We see such development within the text of the Bible itself, and it continued over the centuries until institutional canonization, which is when changes to the text largely stopped.  But the development continued in the way the text was understood, interpreted, applied, translated, paraphrased, and heard.  

Some think the perfect “New York pizza” moment was reached by the early fathers of the Church.  Others say it is the interpretation of the Roman Catholic Magisterium that is authoritative.  Some say it was during the Reformation that finally understood it best.  And still others suggest that the text remains alive today, and we are still learning and hearing valuable new things from it that apply to our time.     

Clearly, authenticity is determined by the living community of disciples that lives in the Holy Spirit, receives the text with joy and respect, and applies it to its life and time.  It is the Spirit in the community that maintains and guards the continuity, which is revealed in discipleship.    

Authenticity, then, is not a matter of scholarship but of discipleship.  The versions and interpretations of the Bible that are most authoritative are those which inspire, inform, critique, shape, and guide people in following Jesus Christ.  In short, it is the quality of our lives as disciples that witnesses to the authenticity of the Bible.

The most authentic Bible is the one that brings you to actual discipleship.  For Jesus Christ is the final criterion of authenticity.  He is the Word of God to which the Scriptures witness.  The proof is in your life and that of the gospel community in which you participate.   

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Democracy, Truth, and Jesus.

The reigning paradigm of Modernity continues to disintegrate.  We find ourselves bereft of a common understanding of truth.  Large percentages of people in our country succumb to self-serving lies based on no more evidence than “I feel it in my heart.”  Democracy itself is therefore threatened, as people are tempted by authoritarian autocracy that seeks to impose arbitrary and convenient lies as “truth” by force.

Democracy and truth are related.  One way to come to a consensus about what is true is to gather as many perspectives as possible, thus avoiding the classic blind-people-describing-an-elephant problem where we take our own views as universally valid.  If many different people look at something, the truth is likely to be what most of them see.

Not always, of course.  We know how easily large numbers of people are influenced, and their perspectives determined, by mass media, propaganda, advertising, religion, and even word-of-mouth.  The fact that a large majority believes something is not necessarily a guarantee of its truth.  Many would suggest that the opposite is true: that most people are clueless and only a tiny minority have any grip on truth at all.

We saw this kind of elitism at the beginning our our republic, when only white, male, property owners could vote.  And even they could not be trusted to elect a President; that was left to a group of insiders called The Electoral College.  African-Americans were counted as 3/5 of a person.  Native Americans were excluded altogether.  And of course women were second-class citizens.  Even what was considered “white” was limited mainly to people of Anglo-Saxon heritage.

And it is white people who now feel most threatened by the expansion of democracy to include more different kinds of people.  It is as if democracy is expendable if it calls white supremacy into question.

White supremacy is the Big Lie that an increasing democracy erodes.  It is the shared consensus we are now losing.  And that is a good thing.  If we want to base our life together on truth, then I suggest that our democracy is still not wide enough.

For Christians, Jesus Christ is the Truth (and the Way and the Life).  One thing we know about Jesus is his radical inclusion.  Throughout his ministry he makes a point of welcoming and healing all sorts of people, especially those who were excluded or marginalized by the leaders and cultural/religious habits of his own society.  Indeed, his vision of God’s Kingdom was one of social reversal, as we see in his mother’s hymn before he was even born, which sets the tone for his whole mission.

Jesus Christ therefore embodies the Truth in practices of radical democracy that advocate for and embrace everyone, from women and children, to lepers and Samaritans, from Roman Centurions to the blind, deaf, and lame, from Judean shepherds to “enemy” foreigners.    

If our democracy is failing it is not for being too broad, but not broad enough.  The answer, if Jesus is any example, is not to re-impose a system where power is limited to an elite class or race, but to break down the walls and start listening to, respecting, providing for, and loving everyone.   

In short, we have to continue to move away from the old consensus based on contradictions and lies that characterized the original slave-republic that was America.  And we have to keep moving into the only sustainable Truth, which is where everyone has a place at the table and a voice in the conversation.

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Community Is Essential.

I read a lot of people who pretty explicitly say, “Jesus is good, but the Church is bad.”  They say the Church corrupted and debased Jesus’ teachings almost from day one.

There is a lot of truth in this, of course.  By the time of the Renaissance the Western Church had been thoroughly corrupted.  It is hard to find any commonality between Jesus and a vile Pope like Alexander VI.  Many people have experienced the Church as a violent, exclusive, hateful institution dispensing punishment, threat, and guilt.  The Church has often been most effective at separating people from Jesus Christ.  Obviously, this is an anti-Church, not the beloved community Jesus intends.

At the same time, I fear that this anti-Church mentality betrays the hyper-individualistic bias that pervades Modern thinking.  For Modernity, tradition and community tend to be viewed as bad, corrupting, degrading factors.  Only the individual is pure and undefiled.  According to this way of thinking, anything that applies any kind of brake to the individual is bad.  Progress is defined as the removal of these restrictions.  

In practice, this serves to feed the ego that people tend automatically to identify with their individuality.  That causes our sense of ourselves as autonomous individuals to move into the center of our existence, becoming the idol around which everything else orbits.

Nothing offends the egocentric individual as much as having to make room for other people.  The most hated restrictions on individual freedom are therefore community and tradition.  That is, the annoyances of having to deal with other people today, and, worse, with the legacy of other people who have died.  To the ecocentric individual, “Hell,” as Sartre said, “is other people.”  

The kind of pure egocentric individualism that Modernity valorizes is, of course, impossible.  The truth is that humans are made to live in community.  People live with others.  Anthropologists sometimes refer to humans as a kind of “small group mammal.”  

The opposite of the Modernistic impulse towards radical individualism is a recognition and acceptance of community as essential to human, and all, existence.  Life happens together.  And this interactive, reciprocal togetherness extends to all people, all of life, all of creation, and even to God.

Jesus comes to establish the Church as an alternative community, a place where every individual is equal and valued for their diverse gifts and voices.  Jesus calls this the Kingdom of God, and he contrasts it with the dominating regime of Empire with its pyramidal rankings of people by wealth, fame, and power.  Empire thrives by playing on the egocentric desires of individuals, making them into enemies or competitors, dividing in order to keep people conquered and the regime in place.

But the Kingdom of God presents a “flattened” and distributed polity in which all are one and God is present with and within all.  It models a community of reciprocal equality and an economy of mutual sharing.  It is originally and radically democratic in the sense of excluding no one.  It takes into account the well-being of the other life forms with which we also live in community.  Indeed, it acknowledges the wisdom (and errors) of ancestors, by the longitudinal democracy of tradition, and the circumspection to act on behalf of the  generations yet to come. 

So the real question is not individual versus community, but moving away from bad forms of community, and living into the kind of liberated community Jesus calls us to.  So when Paul writes, “Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it” (1 Corinthians 12.27), he means that the unity and integrity of the body gives meaning and purpose to the lives of its members.

I would even go further and suggest that “you are the Body of Christ” is addressed not just to the Church, but to the whole  creation.  For we all live in a network of intersecting and overlapping communities.  Just as he is the representative human being, revealing our unity with God and all, Jesus intends the Church to serve as the representative community, where we come to know that the Spirit and Wisdom of God is present in all the others.

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The Attack on the Capitol.

Some perpetrating the assault on the Capitol building the other day carried signs mentioning Jesus, as if the Lord would somehow support what they were doing.  As if this attack were being made in Jesus’ name.  

Jesus himself sparks a disturbance in the Jerusalem Temple that involved violence against property.  Is that act an authorization for what happened on Wednesday?  I am waiting for the leaders of the religious right to start spewing this rationalization.

That analogy might be accurate if the agenda and goals of the mob storming the Capitol had anything in common with Jesus’ mission and ministry.  But they don’t.

The rioters were nationalists, white supremacist, pro-capitalist, and anti-democratic.  Their action was completely rooted in lies.  The first tier of lies had to do with the recent election, which they imagine was corrupted by massive “voter fraud.”  This of course has been conclusively and repeatedly disproven by scores of court rulings and the testimony of elections officials of both parties.  It is a completely invented fable.  But more generally the rioters were marinated in lies, fear, and anger about the direction and state of America.  Mainly they are afraid that it is becoming a multi-cultural, multi-racial democracy.

Jesus, on the other hand, did what he did in the Temple for precisely the opposite reasons and motivations.  He was angry that the center of Jewish life had been turned into a marketplace where the poor were routinely fleeced.  He refers to it as a “den of thieves.”  Jesus actually resists a market-based approach to anything.  He wants to restore the Temple as a “house of prayer for all nations,” which means he is not a believer in the priority, let alone exclusivity, of his own nation.

In his ministry, the Lord Jesus demonstrates radical inclusion of outcasts and the equality of women.  He gives away free food and health care, and implicitly calls for Jubilee, a Biblically mandated redistribution of wealth downward. Jesus commands service to, and identifies himself with, the poor and needy, the marginalized and the imprisoned.  These are exactly many of the people whom the insurrectionists despise and wish to see or keep disenfranchised.

Indeed, Wednesday’s mob, by spewing such lies about Jesus, by attempting to enlist him in their agenda of hate, exclusion, and domination, represented a profoundly anti-Christian perspective. 

Finally, the rioters explicitly attacked democracy.  Their toxic belief in non-existent “voter fraud” is part of an on-going effort to disenfranchise minorities so as to maintain the power of white people.  They therefore, with increasing explicitness, advocate an intensification of undemocratic minority rule.

While Jesus and the early Church do not talk about democracy, which was an impossibility at the time, they are clearly in tune with the Bible’s general suspicion of human autocracy.  The Kingdom Jesus proclaims is God’s, not that of any class or person “of this world.”  The argument can be made that, far from any kind of “divine right of kings,” Scripture leans towards a “monarchy of the anawim,” that is, a politics focused on the needs of the poor, the powerless, and the anonymous with whom God identifies.  A democratic system, while certainly not fully achieving this, holds the most promise.  

And in our 250 year history, the movement has consistently, if sometimes haltingly, been towards the goal of full inclusion of all in our politics.  Indeed, it is this trajectory that most alarms and enrages those represented by the insurrectionists last week.  It is no secret that “making America great again” means a restoration of the supremacy of mainly white, male, Christian, property-owners as the privileged class.   

Thus an attack such as we saw the other day on American democracy is also an attack on the hope implied in the best of the American story, based on the affirmation that all people are created equal and endowed by their Creator with inalienable rights.  The more we seek to live up to that dream, the more we will incur the vicious rage of those who want to drag us backwards.  

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