Attested: The Shape of Emergence Christianity. Part Two: The Book of Liberation.

Worshiping, trusting, obeying, and following Jesus Christ is the only job of the gathering of disciples, the Church.  This job demands all our energy.  It means first of all remembering who Jesus Christ is before and apart from the radically reconfigured version projected and pushed on us by Empire.  The message of the Cross is that the real Jesus Christ is always the One that Empire is trying to silence and kill, but who nevertheless rises to new life to inspire and guide a gathering of followers.  Which is why Barmen starts with the Jesus Christ attested in Scripture. 

The Bible of course has also been commandeered and appropriated, its real message buried under dense strata of interpretation designed to enforce and reinforce the demands of Empire.  But listened to more closely, especially through the lens of Jesus Christ and the New Testament, we come to understand that the Bible offers a profoundly liberating alternative and resistance to Empire.

When I attended seminary one of my Old Testament professors suggested that the oldest verse in the Bible, the verse that everything else likely sprang from, the seed of the whole Judeo-Christian tradition, the most lucid, potent, and fruitful memory that has forever characterized our faith, is Exodus 15:21.  Here it is:

And Miriam sang to them:

"Sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously;

horse and rider he has thrown into the sea."

We hear the voice of Miriam, Moses’ sister, singing in triumph after the miraculous deliverance of the people at the Sea.  It is the song of the band of liberated slaves at the moment when their freedom is guaranteed by the destruction of Pharaoh’s pursuing army.  We may even see the whole Bible as a commentary on that single, pregnant, exuberant verse.  

The entire Biblical story and tradition is essentially and originally about liberation, a movement from death and ignorance to life and Wisdom.  It is written from the perspective of enslaved people who have experienced a miraculous emancipation at God’s hand.  The Bible is at its core and blossoms out of the experience of a group of freed slaves.

We only correctly understand the Bible from this perspective.  It is about the movement from bondage to freedom.  It is good news to the poor, the sick, the disinherited, the disenfranchised, the outcast, the excluded, the oppressed, the lost, and the destitute, and can only be interpreted from their point-of-view.  It concerns hope to the hopeless, and gratitude for God’s miraculous deliverance.

It is also about the destruction of evil.  Pharaoh’s army represents all oppressive and unjust and violent systems that perpetrate inequity, exploitation, bigotry, and tyranny.  The liberation of the people necessarily involves the defeat of a dominating inhuman power.  In other words, Empire.  The Egyptian cavalry's attempt to enforce and restore a regime based on lies finally gets inundated by the reality represented by the surging water of creation.  Such is the inevitable fate of Empire through the Bible until Revelation.  It is no wonder that the Church under the yoke of Empire suppressed this perspective; but it remains there in the text to be discovered.   

The Lord Jesus recognizes this as well.  He pointedly chooses Passover, the holy day commemorating the Exodus liberation event, as the time for his own death and resurrection.  In many parts of Christianity the day we call Easter is referred to as "Pascha," that is, Passover, making the connection to Resurrection explicit.  In the New Common Lectionary the Old Testament reading for The Resurrection of the Lord (Easter) is from Exodus 15.  Jesus clearly sees his own work as a fulfillment of the Exodus, and it is through him that we see the centrality of Miriam's story in the first place.

  Exodus 15:21 is also the song of a woman.  At the most portentous places in Scripture, it is the women who first get it.  And a lot of the time they are named Mary: In addition to Miriam (the name is Hebrew for Mary), Jesus’ mother sings the hymn called the Magnificat, expressing her faith in the One she will bear, witnessing to the Incarnation in explicit political and economic terms.  Mary of Bethany anoints Jesus in advance for his burial, anticipating the way he gives his life on the cross.  She serves thus as the primary witness to his passion; indeed hers is Jesus' only actual anointing with oil, which means that Mary literally ratifies that Jesus is the Christ, the Anointed One.  And Mary Magdalene (the name means The Tower; there was no town named Magdala) is the first to meet and proclaim the risen Jesus, becoming the Apostle to the Apostles.  (She is also likely the one who in the oldest manuscripts proclaims "Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world" (John 11:27).   

Finally, Exodus 15:21 is the song of an Israelite, a member of a minority group which had been forced into slavery and oppressed because of her race.  As they were originally migrants from Canaan, this aspect of being foreigners in Egypt also comes into play.

Miriam's song shows us that the Bible is essentially geared towards the interests of marginalized, excluded, suffering, and exploited people.  And it cannot be authentically pressed into service in the interests of Pharaoh, that is, rulers, owners,  and privileged, wealthy people.  It cannot be used to legitimate the power of the powerful, or to oppress the weak, poor, excluded, or sick.  To use the Bible to advocate for or defend imperialism, colonialism, slavery, racism, the subjugation of women, economic or ecological injustice, the exclusion of refugees and migrants, or any kind of social stratification is to contradict not only it’s heart at Exodus 15:21, but the entire flavor and tenor of the rest of Scripture, culminating with the ministry of Jesus Christ.  Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection constitute the final fulfillment of Miriam's Song, and of the entire Hebrew Scriptures.  

The Church needs regularly and frequently to place itself at the edge of the sea with Miriam, and at the mouth of the empty tomb with Mary Magdalene, and realize again the deliverance to which it is called to bear witness.  The powers that would hold us in crippling and lethal bondage have been vanquished.  The new life has come!

Here is a brief summary of the main flow of the Biblical story, through the lens of Miriam's song. 

1. The "prequel" of Genesis shows how God liberates the creation from chaos, declaring everything God makes as "very good."  We see the disease of ego-centric corruption infect creation, only to be washed away in the Flood.  And then, in the renewed creation, it depicts God's selection of the family of Abraham and Sarah to be the seed of a new humanity that trusts and obeys the Creator, an example and blessing to the whole world. 
2. The Bible continues with the story of God’s people in Exodus.  They begin as slaves under the thumb of a cruel, abusive, and exploitative imperial regime in Egypt.  Thus a fundamental opposition is established in the Bible that will run through every subsequent book.  On one side we find the powerless people of God, and on the other a series of corrupt, mighty, wealthy, privileged, violent, idolatrous empires, and those who want to be like, or benefit from, them.  God is always unequivocally on the side of the former.  Always.
3. So the Bible is essentially a book by and about a band of emancipated slaves and their descendants.  It is therefore inherently suspicious of and opposed to slavery and all forms of coercion and bondage.  (Slavery was, nevertheless the foundation of the economy of world civilization for thousands of years, until the Industrial Revolution, when it got replaced by its upgraded version, Capitalism.  So, while there are passages which tolerate, regulate, and manage the practice as a matter of practical realism, the Bible essentially hates slavery.  We who still participate in Capitalism are in no position to judge ancient peoples in this regard.  Our descendants will shake their heads at our tolerance of a system of owners paying (as little as possible) for people's labor, which is basically a blend of slavery and prostitution.) 
4. God immediately brings the people to Mt. Sinai and gives them a Law.  This Law is designed to ensure that God’s people are a new kind of nation, one that will not devolve into anything like the empire from which they have just been liberated.  Therefore, the Law is clear in its insistence that among the people of God there is fundamental equality.  No class of people will be permitted to accrue permanently appreciably more economic wealth or political power than anyone else.  Leviticus 25 gives us the most clear statement of procedures for making sure this doesn’t happen; it's the ancient Hebrew way of saying "Tax the rich!"  In the new nation, only God leads; other knots of authority and wealth, "events and powers, figures and truths" get undone or subordinated.    
5. Empire expressed idolatry in oppressive, exploitative, and unjust practices against the poor, aliens, workers, and the Earth.  Such injustices are so out of synch with God’s Law that they inevitably bring down upon themselves.  military, economic, or ecological disasters.  Living out of synch with God’s Law means attempting to live a lie, it simply does not comport with reality, and therefore collapses.  This is what happened to Egypt.  Their injustice led directly to a set of 10 ecological catastrophes/plagues, forcing Pharaoh to let God's people go.
6. God gives the people a way to remember and reaffirm their devotion to God and God’s Law by establishing an annual cycle of holy days, and regular rituals centered in the Tabernacle/Temple, which symbolically represented the creation.  Through prayer, song, and sacrifice/meals, the people celebrated their liberation from bondage and gave thanks to their Creator for life and freedom.
7. The conquest of the land of Canaan by God’s people displaced the idolatrous and exploitative petty rulers of Canaanite city-states, which were clients of Egypt.  The incoming mass of formerly oppressed, landless migrants from the desert, probably allied with local oppressed people (see the story of Rahab in Joshua 2), rose up and overwhelmed these oppressive regimes and established a decentralized tribal order ruled by God’s egalitarian Law.  In this case, the Israelites were themselves the disaster that these cities and their leaders earned by their idolatry and injustice.
8. The religion of these tyrants was designed to support their agricultural economy.  It therefore involved gods of economic growth, invented and sponsored by the ruling economic and political class.  To worship these deities was to embrace the unjust and exploitative system perpetrated by the rulers pushing them.  That’s why God required that the people put these gods away: worship of them fostered and legitimated inequality, injustice, and violence in society.  It required allegiance to the rulers and owners who developed these gods, thus acquiescing in an unjust political and economic system.  The epitome of these deities was called Baal.
9. The people of God were originally led by individuals called and authorized by God.  These prophets, priests, and judges did not acquire excess wealth (the priestly tribe was explicitly forbidden from having their own land), nor did they exert power beyond that given them by God, sometimes only for a limited time.  God eventually allows the people to have a king only as a grudging concession to them.  (Read Samuel’s stern warning in 1 Samuel 8:10-18 about what having a human king means.)  None of the subsequent kings was flawless; many of them were pretty atrocious.  Not even the virtues of the few good ones were able to prevent the nation from eventually falling into disaster.  The institution of the monarchy was largely a failure.
10. Even when there were kings in Israel and Judah, they ruled a small, relatively weak country, nearly always threatened, and sometimes overrun by or made subservient to larger neighbors.  Even the glory days of David were later undermined by idolatry and injustice, which led to the permanent split between the two kingdoms. 
11. According to the prophets whom God sends as critics, the failures of the kings were overwhelmingly related to their addiction to idolatry which led to injustice.  The message of the prophets is to reject economic growth as a value in itself, and instead to follow YHWH, whose Law ensured social/economic/ecological justice.  The primary themes of the preaching of most of the prophets were anti-idolatry and pro-social justice.  It is only YHWH who creates a society of peace and prosperity.  Following the gods of economic growth only leads back to the inequalities and injustices of Egypt.
12. Idolatry therefore leads inexorably to social and economic injustice.  The people of God fall into these practices as well.  As a consequence, the Assyrians destroyed the northern Kingdom of Israel, and those tribes were almost never heard from again.  Later, the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem and took the leaders of the last remaining tribe of God’s people, Judah, into exile.
13. The prophets around the time of the exile flatly stated that the failure of the Judean State was a direct result of idolatry and injustice.  The monarchy was permanently eradicated.  In Babylon, the people learned to keep their faith without land, temple, power, wealth, or even political freedom.  Much of the Bible as we know it was edited and compiled by and for a defeated and all-but enslaved people in Babylon.   
14. Second only to the Exodus, the return of God’s people from exile is the great miracle of the Hebrew Scriptures.  The Lord once again vindicates and lifts up the losers, restoring them to the land of God’s promise.
15. The Wisdom tradition in the Hebrew Scriptures articulates the universal and cosmological dimension of Israel's liberation story.  These books, many of which were pointedly left out of the Protestant canon, often give us a broader and deeper perspective on God's Presence.  A central figure in them is Wisdom, in Greek Sophia, a mysterious figure who dances between the Creator and creation, bringing true enlightenment to those who find her.  The centerpiece is a marvelous, multi-layered sensuous, erotic love poem called The Song of Songs.  God, it turns out, is love.  The heart of the commandments is love: "Love one another," "love your neighbor as yourself," "love God with all your" soul and being: these are all teachings proclaimed and embodied by the promised Messiah.
16. When the Anointed One, Jesus, finally comes, he is born, not in a palace, but in a barn to parents who have no place else to go, as they are jerked around by an imperial edict (Luke 2:1-8).  Thus Jesus’ lineage as a descendant of King David affords him no privileges; it doesn’t even get him a real bed to be born in.  In him the Creator thereby lives as one of the poorest of the poor.  At the same time he is recognized and celebrated by religious and ethnic foreigners, even enemies, through signs in creation itself (Matthew 2:1-12).  Both stories affirm that no dominant, patriarchal male figure has anything to do with his birth, which is purely the act of "God and a woman" (Sojourner Truth).
17. In his ministry Jesus categorically rejects wealth and power, critiques those who have them, and identifies himself with the “least” in society (Matthew 25:31-46).  Thus he remains firmly within the tradition of the faith of emancipated slaves.  At every turn, beginning with the hymn sung by his mother before he is born (Luke 1:46-55), Jesus advocates the nonviolent overturning of society.  This happens not by the exertion of power (Luke 4:5-8), but by the establishment of alternative communities of people who trust in him and follow his teachings.  He announces a “Reign of God” (Mark 1:15), which undermines and contradicts the regimes of human rulers, and a advocates for a return to the values of the Law in a new situation (Matthew 5:17-20).  Jesus witnesses to and enacts the Reign of God by his ministry of healing, exorcism, forgiveness, teaching, and example.  In all these activities he raises up hurting, sick, deprived, grieving, and hungry people, whom he says are specially blessed by God (Matthew 5:1-12).  
18. Jesus eventually brings his work to Jerusalem, where he predictably attracts the ire of the religious and political authorities.  By throwing the commercial interests out of the Temple, he so threatens them that they work to eliminate him.  He knows that his arrest and execution by them are inevitable, given his message and ministry of liberation and equity.
19. He also knows that his sacrificial death is necessary.  In giving himself up to die Jesus identifies with all the lynched and unjustly executed, the tortured, the sacrificed, and the scapegoats.  At the same time, he personally weaves together, and fulfills three strands of his own Jewish tradition: (a) The Passover Lamb whose blood protects the soon-to-be-liberated people from the death of the last plague against Egypt (Exodus 12).  The people walk into freedom literally under the blood of this lamb, painted on the lintels of their doorways.  (b) The rituals of the Day of Atonement (Leviticus 16) in which the High Priest uses the blood of the goat representing God to cover (in Hebrew: KPR) the Temple, representing creation.  This blood serves both to protect creation from the harmful effects of experiencing God’s holiness directly, and to connect creation to the beneficial grace of God.  And (c) the figure of the “suffering servant” of God (Isaiah 53), who empathically bears in his own body the consequences of the people’s idolatry and injustice, thus healing and redeeming them.  Interpreting his death through these three lenses, Jesus and the early church understand that he fulfills the promise of the Hebrew Scriptures and opens the way to reconciliation with God for all.
20. Jesus’ resurrection reveals the final truth, meaning, and destiny of all creation as a transfigured life beyond the power of death, thus liberating all who participate in it from fear, anger, and shame, and for God’s life of justice, peace, and love (1 Corinthians 15:20-26).  It removes fear of death as a legitimate motivation, showing that death is merely the transformation into a new and unimaginable form of life (1 Corinthians 15:35-57).  His blood literally permeates and sanctifies the whole creation (John 19:32-35).
21. The disciples of Jesus, now sent by God's Holy Spirit as Apostles, spread throughout the eastern Mediterranean and beyond, lifting up the good news that Jesus, who was executed by the Romans for sedition, nevertheless still lives with, within, and among them, and establishing alternative communities of resistance against the Roman Empire.  These communities, gathered according to Jesus' commandment, around the Table of his Body and Blood, witness to the alternative commonwealth Jesus called the Reign of God.
22. The final book of the New Testament is the most explicitly anti-Empire statement in all of ancient literature.  It depicts in graphic terms the collapse and disintegration of Satan's rule in the form of Roman power, the destruction of "those who destroy the Earth" (Revelation 11:18), clearing a space for the emergence of a New Heaven and a New Earth, of joy, blessing, peace, and justice.       

The Bible, therefore, is not “objective” or neutral.  It is thoroughly biased.  It is not “fair and balanced.”  It doesn’t give equal time to all opposing viewpoints.  It has a definite agenda.  And if we don’t approach the Bible from this perspective, we can get a horribly distorted message out of it, which has in fact happened for much of Christian history.  The Bible was often being read and interpreted from the point-of-view of ruling and owner classes, starting with the Roman Empire.  We inevitably misread the Bible when we try to read it from above, as privileged people who wield wealth and power.  

In truth, the Bible was written for and largely by people without much, if any, wealth, power, and privilege.  Therefore, authentic interpretations of the Bible must be biased towards “the least of these,” and for their benefit. 

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[Part Three will make the point that the Bible belongs to the community of people who trust in and follow Jesus Christ.  That community alone, in the power of the Holy Spirit, is guided by and shaped by the Bible; it also has the right to determine its content and meaning.]

Attested: The Shape of Emergence Christianity. Part One: Barmen and Empire.

Jesus Christ,

as he is attested in Holy Scripture,

is the One Word of God

which we have to hear and which we have to trust and obey

in life and in death.

We reject the false doctrine,

as though the church could and would have to acknowledge

as a source of its proclamation,

apart from and besides this one Word of God,

still other events and powers, figures and truths,

as God’s revelation.

These words, composed by Swiss theologian, Karl Barth, constitute the first thesis of the Theological Declaration of Barmen.  The Declaration was drafted by the leaders of a minority of Christians in Germany in 1934, in response to the taking of power by Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party.  The new government was attempting to do what governments in Europe generally had done for centuries: control the national, State-funded, church.  Though they may not have understood it at the time, we now see that Barmen stands as the first real statement of the Christian Church in opposition to Fascism and therefore to Modernity.    

Fascism remains a constant liability and subtle attraction in the Modern world, as we see in far right ideologies and conspiracy theories seeking to maintain and strengthen the shackles of ignorance, paranoia, bigotry, and division among us today.  For all its propensity to dress itself up in high-minded language about "human rights" and "freedom," the essence of Modernity, the thing it most wants to be and impulsively trends towards, is Fascism.  Fascism reveals Modernity's true nature as a manifestation of Empire.

I use the term "Empire" to talk about the political/economic system that has dominated the West for four-thousand years.  Its identifying characteristics include militarism, expansionism, patriarchy, social and political stratification, subservient religion, and a general hegemony of the wealthy, powerful, and famous.  The economy is designed to extract wealth from human labor and the natural world, to benefit and solidify the status of those at the top.  This describes the dominant regime from ancient Egypt, to the Assyrians and Babylonians, to the Greeks and the Romans, to the Feudal order in the Middle Ages, to its manifestation in our present era of Modernity.

Modernity likes to think of itself as a departure from this model, but history shows that, while it exuded self-serving propaganda, summed up in calling itself "Enlightenment."  In reality Modernity has been dramatically worse than previous manifestations of Empire in the disastrous effects it has had on people and planet.  Its ideology of individualist, techno-materialist rationalism may have felt liberating compared with the Feudal regime it replaced, especially to the class that felt unjustly excluded.  But its expression in colonialism, slavery, Capitalism, industrialism, racism, misogyny, genocide, and constant and increasingly sophisticated and deadly warfare belie this rosy assessment.  It preaches "democracy," but the political economy of Modernity has always been an elitism that favored, privileged, and prioritized the owner class.  And even when it does allow more or less actual democracy, Modernity may always rely on the depravity of the human ego.  If everyone acts in their own personal interest, Fascism is assured.  

Modernity has been driven by a self-righteous, dualistic/binary, objectifying mentality from the beginning.  This is proved by the fact that among those most enthusiastic about the Enlightenment were... slave owners.  Modernity tends inevitably towards the nihilistic narcissism of Fascism.  It is in fact where we are headed fairly inevitably, given the deepening ecological crises we face today, and their festering consequences in terms of catastrophic changes in climate and weather patterns leading to mass migration, mass extinction, habitat loss, and intensifying "natural" disasters.

Empire also always utilizes religion.  It domesticated and coopted most of mainstream Christianity beginning in the 4th century.  It may seem odd that, for adherents of a religion with "Christ" in its very name, so many Christians are so regularly clueless and ambivalent about Jesus Christ.  Discipleship has been exchanged for the arrangement called "Christendom:" Christianity domesticated and subservient to Empire.  Christendom rendered Jesus Christ little more than an quaint and empty logo, a useful mascot defined, projected, and managed by the owner class in their interests, or an embarrassing ancestor whose crazy ideas we may safely dismiss and ignore, even as we piously keep his picture on our walls -- invariably an ethereal white man with perfect hair -- and his Name in our hymns.  He was inevitably reduced to a nice, white, patriotic, middle-class, ineffectual, inoffensive, and fairly irrelevant, man of the past, someone to remember and revere, but under no circumstances actually follow. 

Maintaining the social, political, economic, and moral order of Empire became the main thing for Christendom, with its rationalizations, explanations, and defenses of all manner of cruelty, injustice, and violence.  When Christian leaders offer reasoned apologies for slavery, or encourage mass murder in war, or justify rapacious Capitalism, or promote lynching and other types of cruelty towards the weak, or exclude and vilify gender non-conforming people, or wield the flag in nationalism and militarism, or advocate for State-sponsored morality, they do not follow Jesus Christ as attested in Scripture.  There is nothing more detrimental to the mission of the Church than the obscene spectacle of Christian leaders spouting the nationalist, militarist, patriarchal, white-supremacist line, and participating in, and benefiting from, the inhuman atrocities it spawns. 

Under Christendom, the Empire seduced, bought out, and domesticated the Church, claiming to be itself Christian.  It usurped the manufactured role of Christianity's defender, patron, advocate, and agent, keeping and managing the public image of Jesus Christ, while putting other State-approved "events and powers, figures and truths," in Jesus' place, even in the gathering of disciples.

In many countries, the State, as the local jurisdiction of Empire, directly supported and controlled the church.  This happened in America too, where churches willingly put themselves under the control of "the people."  Of course, if the people were primarily loyal to the State and its economy, of which they were beneficiaries, they tended to shape a faith loyal to the State.  (To show this allegiance, they systematically injected a national flag -- often topped by a golden, imperial eagle no less -- into Christian worship spaces.)  

Many understandably assume, for instance, that a Capitalist political economy is somehow "Christian."  The perpetual projection and amplification in Modernity of "other events and powers, figures and truths" to supplant and distract from the One Word of God, Jesus Christ, makes this apparent.  Modernity operates by imposing completely manufactured categories like nation, race, gender, borders, class, and economic inequality on people.  This generates divisive enmity, fear, and anger.  It feeds the population twisted and spun versions of "history" that favor and glorify the owner class, while vilifying and subjugating everyone else. 

And so horrible sins like slavery, conquest, genocide, eco-cide, and colonialism, were carried out by "Christians" imagining themselves to be doing God's will by obeying their supposedly "God-ordained" political and economic authorities.  The disgraceful spectacle of "Christian" nations regularly making war on each other culminated in the wanton, but very profitable, industrialized slaughter of the 20th century.  This is the consequence of the Church's decision to succumb to the "other events and powers, figures and truths," projected by the Empire, rather than Jesus Christ as "attested in Holy Scripture."

To inhabit its deepest identity as resistance and alternative to Fascism, Barmen insists that the Church -- the gathering of people who trust and follow Jesus -- has always to begin and end with the One whom Scripture refers to as Jesus Christ.  Everything we do and are we come to see through the lens and in the Spirit of this Jesus.  From creation, to the testimony of the Hebrew Scriptures, to its ultimate revelation of Jesus Christ, the liberating, saving, healing, redeeming Word of the Creator has always been the antidote to Empire, of which Modernity is simply the latest and most virulent instance.

The Way of love revealed in Jesus Christ as attested in Scripture, is characterized by compassion, gentleness, simplicity, humility, nonviolence, forgiveness, healing, inclusion, thanksgiving, justice, and joy.  People who actually live according to the Way of Jesus Christ are therefore inherently and necessarily out of synch with Empire and therefore with Modernity.  Empire will always see them as threats to its power, and deal with them accordingly.  

From time to time, though, especially when Christianity is in danger of being so degraded and corrupted that it could lose even a tenuous connection to its Essence, Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit leads some Christians to hear anew the Scriptural witness and calls the Church back to discipleship.  Thankfully, in spite of attempts to dilute or adulterate it, the Church always has the New Testament in which we may rehear the words of, and the Apostles' and Prophets' testimony to, Jesus Christ.  Barmen is doing nothing new in the sense that every movement of renewal in the Church is grounded in "Jesus Christ, as attested in Holy Scripture."  This has been the case from St. Anthony to St. Benedict, St. Bernard to St. Francis, The Beguines to St. Teresa, the Celtic Church to the 16th century Reformers, St. Gregory the New Theologian to St. Nilus, Kierkegaard to Barth, to Liberation Theology and Eco-, Feminist, and Queer Theologies today.

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[Part Two will address what "Jesus Christ as he is attested in Holy Scripture" means, by showing how the Bible is basically a book of liberation inspired by and fulfilled in Jesus Christ.]    

Adulterating the New Testament (revised)

A scholar named Hal Taussig takes the books of the New Testament, adds ten more early Christian writings chosen by an invited "council" of like-minded people, rearranges them all thematically, and adds introductions and prefaces.  He bills it as a way to bring to light some otherwise little-known writings that help us understand that the early Christian movement was much broader in scope than he says the Church would have us believe.  Personally, this diversity neither surprises nor scares me.  But Taussig apparently thinks it's important.  Fine.

Of course, there have always been early Christian texts that the church accepted, cherished, used, learned from, and disseminated, that were nevertheless not included in the New Testament.  Non-inclusion did not necessarily mean rejection.  It did indicate that these texts were secondary and not held to be as authoritative as the canonized texts witnessing to the event of Jesus Christ. 

For instance, the Infancy Gospel of James became the source for a lot of traditional background material about Jesus' birth and family.  A letter called 1 Clement, a book called The Shepherd, and another called the Didache (The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles) were even included in some early collections of New Testament writings.  (Taussig will make a big deal out of this when he claims the canon has always been "fluid."  What he doesn't tell you is that none, that is none, of the books he is advocating for were ever among the books accepted and read by any but isolated groups of people claiming to be followers of Jesus.)  But eventually the gatherings of Jesus' disciples did not find that they met the criteria for final inclusion in the canonical New Testament itself.

The purpose of the New Testament is to provide as direct a witness as possible to the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.  Therefore, it only includes texts that people at the time thought most credibly did this.  Books written later may be valuable, even indispensable.  But if they don't witness to the event of Jesus Christ, they are not included in the New Testament.  Its purpose is not to give a historical reflection on what people thought about Christ over the ages, as worthwhile as that may be.  It is to give us as immediate a view as we can get of Jesus Christ, by recording testimonies of those who knew him, or who knew people who knew him.  This means they have to have been composed within a few generations of his death and resurrection.

We now know that this may not be strictly true of all of the books included in the New Testament.  Some appear to be several decades removed from Jesus' ministry.  But there is scholarly consensus that they were almost all likely completed between the years 50 and around 110, remembering as well that such dating is very difficult.  Nevertheless, the standard views on this has remained fairly steady for 40 or so years.  (We may find hypotheses about the dating of the New Testament in various introductions and commentaries, like those on Wikipedia, in The Anchor Bible Dictionary, or in good study Bibles. (Conservative ones tend to like early dates; in more academic editions, like The Oxford Annotated Bible, the dates tend to be later.)

A friend and colleague of Taussig, Marcus Borg, wrote a book about this called The Evolution of the Word, where he comments on the writings of the New Testament in chronological order, stretching from 50 to 120.  I find his dating of New Testament books to be usually somewhat on the later side, but it is still close to the range accepted by most scholars. 

No responsible scholar disputes that the four canonical gospels are the earliest such documents available to us.  Some argue that Thomas, or portions of it, are as old.  Most scholars believe Mark to be the earliest, with Matthew and Luke drawing on it.  But the priority of the four is not really in question, and never has been.

So far I haven't found anyone (not even Ehrman or Borg) claiming, for instance, as Taussig does, that Luke was written after 140.  (He must have got that date from somewhere, but since his book has no footnotes I have no idea where.)  At best, it seems to me that Taussig is being disingenuous and misleading about dating in an attempt to get his new books onto the same chronological playing field with the New Testament, contending they were all written between 50 and 180 or so.  He says that scholars are all over the map, postulating that some New Testament books "could have been" written well into the 2nd century, and some of his additional books might come from the 1st.  Well, sure, you can find a professor somewhere who has said anything you want.  But mainstream scholarship still says Luke was written about 85.  Taussig also (without evidence) insists that 2 Peter was written in 220! a full century later than anyone else I can find.  This enables him to imagine an extremely wide chronological spread for the canonicals, thus making the books he wants to add seem contemporary with them.  They are not.

Of the writings Taussig wants to add to the New Testament, all ten of them derive from the 2nd, or even the early 3rd, century.  (Some people say Thomas is earlier, even the earliest, but this is still a minority of scholars.  Even the Jesus Seminar found very little in Thomas that merited the red marble indicating words of the historical Jesus.)  This dating is according to the introductions to many of these writings in the seminal collection, The Nag Hammadi Library, which is where Taussig got them.  So, in order to include these books in anything close to the same time-frame with the canonicals, one has to argue for the latest possible dates for the books of the New Testament, and the earliest probable dates for his new ten.  I frankly do not know how one does that with any intellectual integrity.  Rather, it expresses an unstated bias towards a particular outcome: that these books are all from the same time period.  But even then, after all this bending of the evidence, the canonicals are still mostly earlier, sometimes by several decades.

In short, what Taussig and his compatriots have essentially done is take a 1st century collection and added to it a bunch of books from the 2nd century.  Presenting them mixed and rearranged thematically together in one volume certainly makes it seem like they all come from the same time period ("50 to 180").  But they do not.  Some are from the beginning of that range, and others from the end.  If these ten writings were included in Borg's book, for instance, nearly all would have to be tacked on the end, after 120.

So it becomes clear that one reason these books were not originally included in the New Testament could have been because the people of the time didn't find them to be a credible witness to Jesus' life.  They were simply not old enough.  (Aside from the many other reasons they did not meet the Church's criteria.)  I suspect that the canon was effectively closed simply because no more writings were emerging for which a case could be made even by ancient standards that they were from the first century.

Another reason Taussig's ten new books were not included in the canonical New Testament is that most of them also do not appear to have been used much by early Christians.  Aside perhaps from the Odes of Solomon, we do not find contemporary authors like Clement of Alexandria, Ignatius of Antioch, or Tertullian, referring to them, alluding to them, quoting them, or mentioning them at all... except for St. Irenaeus, who meticulously takes some of them apart, demolishing their arguments as vapid, toxic nonsense.  Taussig neglects to inform us of this.  In trying to make the point that the number of acceptable gospels was fluid in the early church, he only mentions that Irenaeus offered a somewhat silly (to us) cosmological/numerological argument for why there should only be four gospels.  Taussig also doesn't tell us that the only "fluidity" the early church had about the gospels was about which of the now canonical four to include.  There were never other gospels under consideration.  Thus Irenaeus (in Gaul), and Tatian (in Syria), and other writers, only ever understood there to be four gospels in the running.

Taussig also claims that the canon was open and malleable for hundreds of years, offering as evidence the fact that we have no official list of New Testament documents until the 5th or even the 7th century.  But just because no list has appeared doesn't mean that there weren't some books that were regularly and constantly used by the communities of Jesus' followers, and some others that seem to have been almost unknown or even avoided.  We can see in the writings of contemporary authors that some books are referred to widely and regularly, and these tend to be the books that finally made it into the New Testament.  Indeed, it's better we have no list because it means communities were free to choose the most helpful books on their merits, not because they were somehow on an enforced list.  

My guess is that various documents were received, accepted, and considered authoritative by local communities because of their spiritual value.  Books were expensive, rare, and took a lot of time and energy to copy.  If a community obtained a book a decision would have to be made whether it was worth making copies to keep and pass around. Our current New Testament is the collection of books the people decided were worth retaining, reproducing, sharing, and reflecting on.

This had to be an organic, decentralized, and democratic process.  Some books were copied extensively and started showing up everywhere.  Other books were not finding wide use.  These were probably kept on the shelf for a while, and eventually got boxed up and put in storage... like the collection discovered near the Egyptian town of Nag Hammadi in 1945.

It is unfortunately not an uncommon procedure in some circles to pretend that, by the 4th century, Christians had all these various books to choose from, and some crabby and oppressive ecclesiastical hierarchs chose only a few that suited their oppressive political agenda.  They drastically edited and then imposed these books on the unsuspecting people, brutally suppressing the rest.  I suppose framing it that way satisfies some modern fantasies, fears, and biases, but it is not accurate.  For one thing, as much as some modern critics like to assume that the early church devolved into something like the Spanish Inquisition shortly after the time of Jesus, the fact is that in the 2nd century the communities of Jesus' followers were in small, illicit, and persecuted groups.  The leadership had no power to oppress anyone beyond excommunication (denial of the Sacrament of the Lord's Body and Blood), and influence over what might get read in worship.  But the idea of a Church Gestapo hounding heretical groups at this time and burning their books is idiotic and ludicrous.   

To illustrate this, I cite a conversation I had the other day on Facebook.  In one of the groups of which I am a member, someone posted a quote by John Spong to the effect that the idea that "Christ died for our sins" was invented by the Church hundreds of years after Christ.  I responded that actually the idea is explicitly mentioned several times in the New Testament.  This is the reaction I got from another member of the group. 

Paul Rack The Canon of the Bible used in the Catholic Church did not come into being until the FIFTH century.  During those years the oral accounts were written, edited and then re-written against emerging theology.  There were several hundred versions of the Gospels up to then.  Also a whole bunch put in the trash of the day.  In accounting, we call it "cooking the books".

This perfectly expresses the false views that people like Taussig are willfully breeding in the minds of many.  Every sentence is patently false.  But it is what many educated people today have been taught to think, especially my friends in progressive circles.  It certainly fits many of the myths of Modernity, which is why it has been so powerful.  (I simply answered by asking the person to show me who is suggesting that 1 Corinthians 15 is a later addition.  No response as yet.)  

We see from the current canon that the early Church was not afraid of wide theological diversity.  The books of the New Testament are remarkably broad in their perspectives on the events to which they witness.  Indeed, some secular scholars have made the point repeatedly to discredit the New Testament that so many of the stories are contradictory and don't jive.  I'd think that if this was a conspiracy by the hierarchy to concoct an ideologically consistent text they would have been more rigorous about it.  My point is that any text for which a good case could be made that it came from the first century, would certainly have been too valuable not to be preserved, copied, shared, and seriously considered for inclusion in any eventual canon.  Maybe people back then were more concerned for getting it right than they were for the ideological consistency that is an obsession for many today.

One question about A New New Testament is: Why?  Taussig has taken it upon himself to decide that "the spiritual thirsts of our day need more nourishment," as he says in his Preface.  Leaving aside the hubris, arrogance, and presumption of that statement (and his whole project), the New Testament was not compiled to "quench the spiritual thirst" of anyone's day.  It was just to tell us about the revelation of God's love in Jesus Christ with as much directness and honesty as they could.

He also worries about what he calls "churches' strangleholds" on what he says they deem to be "unarguable truth about a certain kind of Jesus."  Thus, Taussig betrays his disgust with gathered communities of Jesus' followers.  As I suggested earlier, the New Testament was formed by people of faith called together for worship and education.  A community, especially one that was at the time marginalized and at risk from State persecution, has every right and responsibility to shape its own documents and set the terms of its own membership.  The New Testament has always belonged, not to scholars, not to "the people" or the government, but to the Church.

Taussig's mistrust of living faith communities is further revealed in his use of the rather negative term "stranglehold" to describe the way churches cherish the Jesus of the New Testament.  Maybe he is referring to stereotypical conservative and evangelical churches, and of course the Catholic Church, who might maintain images of Jesus he doesn't like.  I get that.  I too am disgusted by the false depiction of Jesus as an armed, white, middle-class American, for instance.  The "Jesus" proclaimed by January 6 insurrectionists is not the Jesus of the New Testament. 

I find it more fruitful to turn to the Bible and point out how such self-serving, violent, paranoid, nationalist images of Jesus contradict the Jesus we see in the four gospels we already have.  I, for one, fully intend to maintain my own "stranglehold" on what I deem to be "unarguable truth" about Jesus.  For the Jesus presented in the canonical gospels is all about liberation, forgiveness, inclusion, welcoming, equity, healing, non-violence, economic justice, and walking lightly on the earth.  In short, he embodies the shalom and agape of God.  He proclaims God's Commonwealth over-against the empires of his day, and establishes alternative communities based on blessing and sharing. 

When some start messing with the text of the New Testament, it creates confusion and undermines the image of Jesus.  It is like Steve Bannon's approach to the media, which is to "flood the zone with shit" so people are unsure of what to believe, and thus become dupes for vile propaganda and idiotic conspiracy theories.  This is the effect that adding books to the New Testament will have, especially these books that so often contradict its basic message and diluting its inherent and essential anti-imperialism.  In his account of a Trump rally, journalist Jeff Sharlet even makes explicit a connection between Trumpism and the spirit of Gnosticism.  It presents "the divine as a series of contradictions" only understood by selected insiders with the required gnosis, who dismiss their orthodox opponents as "fake news" and see a "deep State" where gnostics rejected the witness and authority of the bishops (Sharlet, Jeff. The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War). 

Ironically, it has only been in the last few decades that the anti-imperialist core of the New Testament has been allowed to emerge from the heavy overlay of domesticated interpretations it acquired under centuries of the State-sponsorship of Christendom.  Indeed, we already have a new New Testament!  (See the work of Richard Horsley, Ched Myers, Maurice Richard, Elizabeth Schuessler-Fiorenz, and many, many others.)  We do not have to dig up some obscure writings hauled out of the back room of a 5th century monastery in the desert someplace to find the Jesus we need right now.  He is right there in the New Testament we already have.  We just have to learn how to look, even if it means digging through centuries of corrupt imperialist interpretation.

Frankly, some of the books added by Taussig's council show a strong bias towards an anti-creation, elitist spiritual escapism that deflates the pointed political character of the actual New Testament, which has an anti-imperialist apocalypticism at its core.  His adulterated New Testament is really not radical enough!  The additional books talk a lot about knowledge, and about love and justice almost never.  They are certainly less radical than the canonical New Testament that Rome, failing to stamp it out, finally had to co-opt, appropriate, domesticate, obscure, buy-off, regulate, and bury under imperialist propaganda.   

For instance, Taussig includes The Secret Revelation of John, (more commonly called The Apocryphon of John) a late 2nd century text full of esoteric, metaphysical and, well, bizarre, mythology.  Contrast this exercise in obscure symbolism imported from Greek esotericism, with the canonical book of Revelation, a highly symbolic, grounded in the Hebrew Scriptures, and thoroughly political, description of the collapse of Imperial Rome as an indication of the fate of all empires, culminating in Christ's emerging reign of peace.

Then there is a book called The Gospel of Truth, written in the second half of the 2nd century.  This is another highly mythologized take on Jesus, in which he comes into the world with true knowledge, but gets crucified by a personified feminine figure called Error.  Once again, it is a depoliticized version of the gospel.

And the claim that these books are somehow "feminist" is what we are supposed to glean from the fact that they devalue matter and bodies generally.  Thomas even has the remarkably sexist line about how females have to make themselves male to inherit the heavenly kingdom (Thomas 114).

These writings have in common an underplaying the Incarnation and the cross.  This is significant because the Incarnation shows a love of and participation in creation.  And the cross was the anti-imperialist core of the gospel.  Thus Jesus neutralizes Rome's terroristic violence, and the conquered and colonized nations are set free.  The cross also embeds Jesus in Jewish traditions about the slaughtered Lamb of the Exodus, the blood of the goat of the Day of Atonement, and the suffering servant in Isaiah. 

So, while the much-maligned orthodox were following the Jesus of the New Testament in building communities of peace and serving needy people, and often being harassed (or worse) by Roman authorities for it, there were also these other people claiming to be Christians who had a depoliticized application of the faith that does not appear to have bothered Rome at all.  They were focused not on love or justice, but on the personal acquisition of secret spiritual knowledge. 

Taussig tries to neutralize the word "Gnostic," which continues to be applied by scholars who specialize in the topic to many of the works he is trying to add to the New Testament.  He appears to be bravely appealing for a "no labels" approach which reads these books for their intrinsic value.  But "Gnostic" is not a meaningless term.  While there were many different schools of gnosticism, the fact remains that they did have some characteristics in common.  Scholars continue to use the term, distinguishing Gnostic from non-Gnostic texts.  Taussig's proposed additions tend to share many characteristics of Gnosticism.

What confuses me in all this is that Taussig and his friends in the Jesus Seminar have spent decades analyzing the gospels to separate the "authentic" words of the "historical Jesus" from later material that they determined was therefore of less value.  They only found the true gospel of Jesus in the verses meriting a red marble, in their historical assessment according to a set of arbitrary criteria.  The rest, 80% of Jesus' words, were supposedly written later and put in Jesus' mouth.  Therefore, they should be disregarded or at least devalued.  (Read the introduction to The Five Gospels if you think I am making this up or misrepresenting them.)  But now, having famously made the point that their assessment of earliest is best, some of the very same people are trying to add material from a century later, most of which, according to their own criteria, has almost zero claim to be from their "historical Jesus"!  They don't seem to care about this anymore.  It makes me wonder if finding the authentic words of Jesus was ever the point, and the real agenda wasn't always undermining the integrity of the New Testament as a whole.

Finally, even if we might be attracted by some of what these books are saying, when we purport to make writings part of an accepted, authorized canon of Scripture it is not just about the books, taken by themselves, but has to include their context, authorship, history, and relationship to the other writings in the larger collection.  The writings Taussig presents often have more to do with the intellectual, spiritual, mythological, and intellectual currents in the 2nd century, than with the biblical tradition.  These writings simply do not owe very much to the Judaic roots of actual Christianity.  

Hence, I fail to understand the value of adding these books to our New Testament.  They come from a different historical era, and they contradict, or at least disregard, the most important counter-cultural strands of the New Testament.  In an era dominated by our own version of imperialism in the form of globalized commercial Capitalism, how are we helped by watering-down the New Testament with documents that preach a non-political, otherworldly -- perhaps even anti-creation and anti-Creator -- message?

Maybe the reason why these writings did not make the cut in the first place is that they had little to say to ordinary people living under the domination of Empire, but appealed instead to a wealthy, privileged class who were content to feed on Empire's spoils, and who thought of themselves as a spiritual elite keeping special knowledge.  One theory concerning why these books eventually fell into disuse is that they appealed mainly to collaborators with the Empire, who eventually dissolved into it.  Taussig himself seems aware of this when he subtly implies that including such people is part of his agenda.  As if resistance to Empire was a concern of some Christians back then, but not important today.  My view is that his new books serve to water-down the anti-imperialism of the New Testament, making it more palatable to people who have bought into globalized commercial Capitalism, which is the manifestation of Empire we have to resist and offer a witness in the midst of now.

A famous quote from Desmond Tutu comes to mind: "If you are neutral in situations of injustice you have chosen the side of the oppressor."  What other effect does the paradoxical marriage of opposites in a book like Thunder have than such  neutrality?  What happened to the "preferential option for the poor" that was the basic insight of Liberation Theology? 

Christianity certainly often took very bad paths historically, especially after the 4th century, feeding nationalism, economic injustice, misogyny, and homophobia for centuries.  And we have faced ghastly crises, especially recently with the gruesome and disgracefully pervasive child sex-abuse scandals rocking the Catholic Church, and the perverse turning of so many Evangelicals to Trumpism.  We have not been very faithful to Jesus.  But the Jesus we have failed is the Jesus we see in the New Testament.

And that's the point.  Our main job today is to continue the work of removing the calcified layers of imperialist interpretation under which it has been buried for over a thousand years, so that its true liberative nature may emerge and bear fruit in the living communities of Jesus' followers.   

In our time, following Jesus, in the sense of actually living according to his example of non-violence, justice, healing, inclusion, compassion, generosity, humility, simplicity, forgiveness, peace, and self-emptying love, is of vital importance.  The fate of the planet depends on it.  We need to lift up a radically embodied faith that celebrates and cares for people and planet.  Attempting to mix in elements of a-political elitist, esoteric, spiritually escapist versions of Jesus doesn't help us resist and offer an alternative to today's version of Empire.  Just the opposite.  It distracts from discipleship and its cost.  It gives us a tempting way to stay "Christian" while in reality cutting off at the knees the best witness we have to the liberating love of God revealed in Jesus Christ: the actual New Testament.

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