Getting the Story Right... Or Wrong.

In the New York Times over the weekend, Nicholas Kristof interviewed Elaine Pagels, who has apparently written another book.  Here's the whole article.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/21/opinion/virgin-birth-jesus.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare&fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR1KTT0T7uiI_mhJ7s2SmX2BWYnurSAkssDQOfMU--Ed-oyu4UZqHUezXJk_aem_7HgqKv-lCqc4RTQJZz574g

Christians hold the story of Jesus' mother giving birth to him without having sex with a man as essential.  You cannot accurately call yourself a Christian if you clam up for part of the definitive Creeds.  The problem has always centered on how we believe it, what believing it means, and what we do with this belief.  

On the one hand, Empire has always twisted the Virgin Birth story in ways that perpetuate imperial power.  Medieval theologians decided it was all about Mary's "purity" because they learned from St. Augustine that sex was evil.  This of course saddled real women with impossible standards -- virgin and mother -- and served to keep them subservient and subject to guilt-trips for centuries.  Modern theologians like Pagels attack the doctrine mainly because, in reaction to that Medieval view, they have judged it as non-historical and contrary to what we know of gynecology, therefore untrue.  In searching for the "truth" they assumed that some man impregnated Mary.  They dismiss the Virgin Birth story as concocted mainly to imitate other mythic and political miraculous births.  

Kristof insists Pagels talk about how her book points "to ancient evidence that Jesus might have been fathered by a Roman soldier, possibly by rape."  

First of all, that's not our story.  I have zero patience with people who need to contradict the Christian story.  As if everything needs to happen in order to gratify our needs and preferences.  So if I don't like some aspect of a story, I should feel free to adapt it to something more satisfying to me.  When we do this to our own personal memories, we call it delusion or lying to ourself.  When we do it to someone else's story, it is slander.

Perhaps Pagels dredges up this "Mary was raped" lie because she feels it has the underscores Mary's situation as an oppressed woman.  It supposedly shows God bringing good out of evil.  While this interpretation may theologically redeem the slander, Empire can easily utilize it like an opiate, excusing its own evil.  "Too bad this happened to you, but think of our new baby!"  

If we want to hear what the story means when not whitewashed by Empire, coming from the mouth of an actual oppressed woman, we might listen to abolitionist and former slave, Sojourner Truth.  In 1851, she stated that Christ came "from God and a woman.  Man had nothing to do with him."  In other words, the Virgin Birth separates Jesus from patriarchy.  It prevents any man from claiming to have brought him into the world.  Completely cut off from a male line, he has no inheritance, his bloodline comes through King David and Abraham by adoption.  According to the alternative exhumed by Pagels, the Empire, represented by a soldier, may claim parental rights over God.  Jesus isn't even fully Jewish, anymore, but half something else.  It makes Jesus white.  Now the Empire owns him.  The DNA would show it.

That's good news for Empires, at any rate.  Our own version of Empire, Modernity, has very effectively exercised paternity over God by basically reducing Jesus Christ to a harmless mascot while using his image as a cynical spiritual warrant for its regime of eco-cide, vivisection, exploitation, and domination.  Modernity sired a "historical Jesus," different from the One in the gospels, who only says and does what Modernity decides measures up to its criteria for "truth."  Just as Rome used the cross as a warning of what will happen to resisters, the effect of Pagels' story is to remind women on behalf of Empire: "your body, my choice."  "You will bring into the world what we make you bring into the world."    

It does not surprise me that Pagels has so much enthusiasm for this.  Her entire career has been an aggressive affirmation and articulation of the hold that Empire -- that is, Modernity -- has over Jesus Christ.  For her, the categories, methodologies, mentality, demands, and assumptions of Modernity determine who Jesus is.  Modernity thus  "liberates" Jesus from his own family, the community of his disciples, the Church.    

In the article she seems to try to move away from historicity and understand the stories more as stories, "They are not written simply as history; often they speak in metaphor.  We can take them seriously without taking everything literally," she says.  "I left Christianity behind," she relates, after having experienced one of its more toxic aberrations in particular church.  But compelled by "something powerful" she went back, "asking questions.  How were these stories written?  How do they affect us so powerfully?  They speak to a deep human longing for a sense of transcendence and spiritual experience.  For we can respond to the same story in more than one way.  As a historian, I question the literal truth of the virgin birth story.  But I still love the midnight service on Christmas Eve, where the story is gloriously told and sung as miracle."  So she balances her welding the machete of scientific method with a  saccharine sentimentality.  

I get the impression she believes these stories are mainly entertainment, spectacle, written for what kind of feelings they produce.  They can't possibly be about God; it always has to be about what we want and what we feel.  Such is the Modern view of everything.  It's all about us, me.   

Uh, no.  I realize that Pagels merely reflects the confusion, chaos, and compromise  that hobbles churches this time of year.  But these invented reimaginings of the story tell us nothing about Jesus, God, the world, or us.  They only push the empty, novel, desperate ideas of the inventors.  They are certainly not worth a trip to church to hear about.

I'm sorry Pagels had a bad experience in some church somewhere.  It does not justify her for poisoning our stories with such malicious nonsense.  I say, let the stories shine in the radical, deeply subversive, highly transformational glory they have without her redactions.  Pagels appears to be too thoroughly indoctrinated into the ideology of our own Empire to see that.

+++++++              

Cardiology and Ecclesiology.

I've had three cardiologists, not counting the one who put a stent in my Right Coronary Artery (whom I barely remember because I was kind of out of it).  I now visit my current cardiologist regularly, but thankfully now infrequently.  Generally, I do whatever they say to do.  I take whatever medications they say to take.  I eat and avoid eating according to their instructions (more or less).  Indeed, a good percentage of my daily behavior revolves around this advice.  I trust my cardiologist to set me on the right path to avoid another Myocardial Infarction ("heart attack") and thus stay physically functioning within acceptable parameters on this planet.

I do not "do my own research" beyond what I need to know to ask the right questions.  I most certainly do not dismiss my cardiologist's advice or orders as the biased product of some corrupt elite, and follow instead my own theories, feelings, and desires.  

(A friend of mine did this.  He had a heart attack and bypass surgery, and followed his cardiologist's advice for years, until he attended a seminar with a Dr. Atkins where he got the idea that it wasn't about the cholesterol at all, but carbohydrates.  So he changed his behavior back to regular fried bacon and eggs, but no bread....  Soon thereafter he had such a massive Myocardial Infarction that he was dead before he hit the ground.)

These days I hear a lot about people who reject this or that orthodoxy as hopelessly corrupted by the agenda of the "elite," with no purpose other than to keep them in control and increasing in wealth at our expense.  Experts, science, peer review, fact checking, scholarship, indeed anyone who went to college or got an advanced degree in anything all fall under suspicion as fatally tainted by "wokeness," a word they use to lie about some arbitrary philosophy which expresses the elite's power.

This perspective has always lurked in the Church, especially in Protestantism, but I notice it becoming more prominent today.  Protestantism inherently contains a "do your own research" strain that thinks of faith as a private relationship between God and each individual, and any person's interpretation of the Bible is as legitimate as any other.  Some now consider having gone to seminary a handicap for ministers, especially if this hifalutin knowledge tells people what they don't want to hear.  We have had people relying on charismatic influencers rather than accredited and ordained pastors for decades now.

We don't just see this on the populist right, but it infuses the thinking of "Progressives" as well.  Consider this quote, attributed to liberal icon Barbara Brown Taylor: "What if the church invited people to come tell what they already know of God instead of to learn what they are supposed to believe?"  She goes on to basically say that the church's job consists of blessing people for what they are already doing in the world.  Thing is, if my cardiologists had that approach to their work I'd be dead.  I can't think of anything more horrifying than that my cardiologist would pay much attention to "what I already know" about my heart, which is next to nothing.  Why would I waste my time listening to people "tell what they already know of God" based, no doubt, on their own research or experience?  A lot of people are "already doing in the world" perfectly awful things for which we should most certainly not bless them.

In my experience, Presbyterians have such a deficient ecclesiology that it gets easily overwhelmed by influences from a culture dominated by the values, practices, and structures of Modernity.  We reflexively despise authority, suspect "religion," and devalue the gathering of believers, as if these were unconscionable restraints and restrictions on our individual freedom to do as we please.  They get in the way of one's "personal relationship with Jesus," a contagion we contracted from Evangelical influencers.  

We have forgotten the purpose of the Church.  Therefore, unless we just abandon it altogether (as much of the West is doing), we have to dream up some reason for its existence that makes sense to us.  It seems like the Church only becomes intelligible to Modernity as a social club, an educational institution, a cadre of activists, an ethnic enclave, a community center, a place to receive spiritual comfort or moral advice, or a nostalgic anachronism.  Some of these activities may relate to the Church's actual identity as Christ's Body, but all of them are derivative and secondary.  

The Church is where people, through worship and mission, discipleship and repentance, participate in the means of grace -- the Word, Sacraments, and prayer -- and so come into obedience and conformity with Jesus Christ and acquire the Holy Spirit.  

The Church therefore has a specific task requiring particular tools, expertise, practices, stories, and rituals.  It teaches a lifestyle.  It has this in common with cardiology -- and frankly any institution (another bad word) that has a purpose, from a bowling league to a Spanish class to a dance troupe to a string quartet.    

(One town I heard about had a group called the Quilting Club.  Originally, they  actually made quilts, discussed quilting technique, shared fabrics, and distributed quilts to needy families.  But over time, the subsequent generations became less interested in quilts.  They didn't have the time and the specialized knowledge was lost.  But they were still friends.  So the Quilting Club morphed into a group of women who met monthly for lunch.  Maybe they raised money to buy quilts to distribute at Christmas, but they really didn't have any interest in actual quilting.  They considered it quaint and quirky, a kind of secret among themselves, that they retained the name.  If you showed up and actually wanted to learn quilting, they wouldn't even know to whom to refer you.  In other words, a rock band calling itself "The Cardiologists" is unlikely to help me lower my blood pressure.  So a group calling itself a Christian church should be able to provide guidance and support for a journey of spiritual transformation, but don't necessarily count on it.)  

The thing about cardiology is that its practitioners share a common expertise and practice.  Though you might get some differences in personality, style, and approach around the edges, the basics of reading an EKG, making diagnoses, and prescribing medications are going to be largely the same whether I go to one in New Jersey or Germany, no matter what medical school they attended, or what book they read last week.  I can trust that they're not going to tell me that something they got off the internet or heard on a podcast means that now my heart would be cool with my smoking, drinking more alcohol, consuming mass quantities of fat and salt, and sitting on the couch watching TV all day.  

I trust the same things of a shamanic healer or a practitioner of ayurvedic or Chinese medicine, a Chiropractor or a yoga instructor.  I expect them to know their stuff and honestly give me their insights and advice from within that tradition and community of knowledge.  I expect them to have expertise.      

What if people came to church with expectations like I have when I go to the cardiologist?  What if we could assume the Pastor of a Christian church to have  competence to teach someone the Way of Jesus in continuity and partnership with his followers of every age?  Jesus commands his disciples to make disciples, to teach people to follow him by taking on specific attitudes and behaviors.  If someone asks me a question about following Jesus' Way, I should be able to give them a straight answer based on my tradition, community, and experience.

I depend on my cardiologist to answer my questions.  I expect them to have some expertise and information that I do not have because I haven't had their training or their experience dealing with people in my situation.  I tire of the idea that we in the Church can't do anything more than just join people in their questions.   We're pretending like the subject matter at church doesn't really mean anything in particular or specific, that it's just a bunch of answerless questions we struggle with together to find our own personal answers.  Uh, no.  I go to my cardiologist with questions... but I want to go home with answers, and a plan of action.  People need to know we in the Church have ana answer to their questions and his Name is Jesus.  We have a diagnosis and we have prescribed remedies.  We need to say, "This is how we follow Jesus, we do this and this and this and this.  

(Like when a minister said to me they "struggle" with the words of the Baptismal Formula.  I, a presbytery Stated Clerk, replied, "Struggle all you want.  But when you do a Baptism, you need to use the words."  Not because the Book of Order says so, which it does.  But because Jesus says so, and the entire 2000 year tradition of Christianity says so.  It's not a matter of interpretation or innovation.  It's not something open to our questions.  It's a matter of simple obedience.  If we can't do what he says in this obvious and easy case, how will we do what he says when it is difficult, challenging, and ambiguous?)

Yes, I realized of course that the Bible has many different perspectives and approaches.  But my job as a Pastor, except in Bible study, is not to say, "Well, Paul says this, but maybe that wasn't really Paul, and Leviticus says this, but Isaiah says something different, and then Jesus says this in Mark but this in John, so basically take your pick and do what feels right to you."  The community and tradition have determined boundaries of interpretation.  These are not impermeable or unchanging, but they do give us guidance.  The deeper the tradition goes, the more we should respect it.  Ultimately, Jesus Christ as attested in Scripture has priority.  A community of disciples should have clearly articulated standards and preferred interpretations, based on the texts and on the shared experience of what works.  

And humility means that, unlike cardiology, it remains possible that our presentation of the Way of Jesus will not work for everyone.  In the end, the soul is not a physical organ like the heart.  It is not as subject to the rules of chemistry and physics.  Someone may simply do better on another path.  In this case we let people continue their search elsewhere; we do not try and adjust or adapt our path to the point of threatening its basic coherence and integrity, in order to accommodate them.  Zen teachers don't become Southern Baptists because that's what people who show up prefer.

(It reminds me of a book by Thomas Merton: The Waters of Siloe in which he recounts the history of the Cistercian Order.  The Cistercians' practice includes establishing monasteries in different places, starting with a few monks.  If the place thrives, they praise and thank God.  But if it does not thrive, they eventually decide to close up shop and move on to somewhere else.  (Jesus teaches something like this in Matthew 10:14.)  They do not try to adapt the practices that are constitutive to the Cistercian way by changing them to suit what will better attract adherents in specific locales.  (Jesus also makes this point in Mark 4:1-20.  The sower doesn't change the seed to suit the different kinds of soil.  It thrives or it doesn't.)  

Basically, I hope for a Church that knows what it's doing and does it with confidence, and humility.  But does it, and has the integrity to share it with and teach it to those who ask.

+++++++     

   

The Modern Conspiracy Theory About Christian Beginnings.

I recently read Victoria Loorz' book, The Church of the Wild.  The book actually has a lot of value in shifting our thinking and acting in a more ecological direction.  I found a lot to love in it.  But for some reason she feels a need to digress into early Church history with disastrous effect.  I reference this because it summarizes so well the story concocted under Modernity to "explain" Christianity and the Church.  Here is what she wrote. 

One of Constantine’s first agenda items was to get the religion in order.  He had attributed his military success to placing the symbol of the Christian religion on his soldiers’ banners and shields.  This led him to end persecution of Christians and eventually adopt the religion as his own (albeit on his deathbed.)  But at that time, there were many different interpretations and expressions of Christianity throughout the kingdom, and that was causing conflict.  Plus, a religion that asserts a single ruling identity for the deity would be helpful to remind folks that there was a new solo emperor too. 

The fight was on for who was going to control the narrative of the newly legal church of the Roman Empire.  Dissenting voices were shut down.  And a war over the nouns of God was raging.  The doctrine of the Trinity—a conceptualization of a single God with three parts—was forming through debates and fights and power trips. 

So Constantine personally invited three hundred or so of the 1,800 bishops in the empire and escorted them, free of charge, to the imperial palace in Nicaea (now Bursa, Turkey, a lovely lakeside city).  The bishops—all of them male, of course—were to come to agreement about the hotly debated hierarchy of the Godhead nouns, something their Hebrew predecessors never thought about.  Defining the noun-ness of God “correctly” was an ongoing obsession of men with power. 

The Nicene Creed was the result.  These early church fathers—literally called the patriarchs—used language as a tool of dominance.  From what I’ve read, the whole lot of them were power hungry, cloying for position and recognition, and they attacked one another mercilessly.  These were the men who controlled the narrative.  The Nicene Creed was meant to settle the God-noun argument and condemn any who dissented as heretics.  And it’s been used since then as a statement of orthodoxy, with slight adaptations, throughout history. 

The Council of Nicaea didn’t end the rivalry, though.  For another sixty years, the debate over how to arrange the nouns of three entities to describe one God continued.  People were excommunicated, exiled, and even killed over it. Finally the emperor Theodosius I ended the debate by imperial decree in 380: Nicene Christianity became the official state religion, complete with harsh condemnation of anyone with different ideas of what Christianity looked like, calling them “mad men” and persecuting them with a “divine authority.”  The pope commissioned a revised set of Old Latin gospels to be used authoritatively by the Roman Catholic Church.  These were called the Vulgate, meaning “for the commoners,” which is ironic because the commoners didn’t read Latin—only the priests did. 

In this sanctioned Vulgate version of the New Testament, the decision was made to use verbum (word) to translate logos for the opening hymn of John 1.   Verbum means just one single vocable, the smallest fragment of language that has meaning: a single word.  While it doesn’t make grammatical, contextual, or historical sense, it does make a point.  Word (verbum) fit the objective of the “single supreme authority” of the now official Holy Roman Empire Church. 

After all, allowing Conversation (sermo) to define the essence of Christ could encourage those dissenting voices to be heard.  No.  They had been effectively shut down.  Word was better.  No back-and-forth, no room for dissent, no changes.  Just the one and only Word, the last word, the capital-W Word.  The inarguable Word, the end-of-discussion Word, the everyone-else’s-word-is-heresy Word.  The hierarchy chooses Word, and so it remains Word.

End of conversation.

Loorz, Victoria. Church of the Wild: How Nature Invites Us into the Sacred (pp. 119-121). Fortress Press. Kindle Edition. 

Here we get a succinct rendition of the standard conspiracy theory about Christian beginnings approved and propagated by Modernity.  We often hear this sort of thing from people deeply damaged by their background in conservative evangelical or Catholic churches.  In reacting against them, some, like Loorz, apparently feel a need to reject Christianity altogether.  To justify this, she misrepresents early Christian history in a simplistic, self-serving, and indeed pejorative and defamatory way.  I find it difficult not to take personally her gratuitous insults directed at the spiritual tradition I follow. 

Now, Loorz does not claim to write as a historian, so my critique here may seem unfair.  But I find it irresponsible for an author to simply repeat nonsense.  And she really doesn't need to!  Her book has a lot of value otherwise, and deleting this couple of pages would not have damaged her argument at all.  But a lot of writers exhibit this tendency.  Rather than focus on the good things they want to say, they seem to feel obligated to invent and frame an enemy to condemn and blame for their situation.  They will spin the historical record and even just plain make stuff up.  Loorz repeats some of the usual assumptions of Modern thought: the bias against communities and tradition, the assumption that only the worst forms of Western Christianity exist, the idea that somehow the Spanish Inquisition represented the basic agenda of the church from the beginning.  That sort of thing.  

In her blanket rejection of Orthodox Christianity, Loorz also defames a lot of the people she manages to quote favorably in other parts of her book, all of whom affirmed and lived by the same Nicene Creed that she has decided comes from a bunch of power-hungry men and their vicious, conniving Emperor.  This list includes: Julian of Norwich, John of the Cross, Hildegard of Bingen, Meister Eckhart, Catherine of Siena, Thomas Merton, the entire Celtic church, Howard Thurman, and Richard Rohr.  One would think that perhaps she could have approached with a tad more humility these people and trust them to have a clue about their own faith.  But apparently she does not.  She seems to feel she knows better.   

"There were many different interpretations and expressions of Christianity throughout the kingdom."

Here we find a central part of the Modernist propaganda about the early church.  This makes it sound like it was a hodgepodge of groups, all with valid and roughly equal appeal and constituencies.  On the one hand, apparently many different groups did exist which had different takes on Jesus.  However, we find nearly all of them on the fringes of the faith.  On the other hand, while we have no way of getting to actual numbers, judging from the extant manuscripts and recorded contemporary testimonies, an overwhelming majority of Christians in the early centuries participated in the mainstream Orthodox tradition of the Apostles, who actually knew Jesus.    

"A religion that asserts a single ruling identity for the deity would be helpful to remind folks that there was a new solo emperor too."

Of course, prior to Constantine the emperor was considered a god, so for him to recognize another, higher God than himself would have meant rather a demotion.  Plus, it's not like Constantine ruled as the first solo Emperor who therefore needed to justify his reign by imposing monotheism; his predecessors were all polytheists.  The relationship between the Emperor and the Church remained complicated, shifting, often adversarial, and took centuries to get finalized, largely with the Church emerging in the higher position.  By no means did the Church simply carry out the Emperors' bidding.  Loorz' simplistic and uninformed depiction of this does her readers a disservice.

"The fight was on for who was going to control the narrative of the newly legal church of the Roman Empire.  Dissenting voices were shut down.  And a war over the nouns of God was raging."

No one "shut down" all "dissenting voices."  The Council of Nicaea included bishops who followed Arianism, a belief that Jesus was not coeternal with God but a human whom God uniquely blessed.  In fact, the Emperor probably would have preferred Arianism to prevail, and several of his successors did oppose the Church on these kinds of questions.  The fact that "dissenting voices" existed and needed to be heard is why they called Councils in the first place.  Loorz anachronistically reads her understanding of Medieval Catholicism and 20th century totalitarianism into the 4th century.  This tells us more about her than it does about the Church at that time.

"The doctrine of the Trinity—a conceptualization of a single God with three parts—was forming through debates and fights and power trips."

No one with a rudimentary understanding of Christian theology would say that the Trinity is "a conceptualization of a single God with three parts."  The doctrine appears in Scripture, but it did take a few centuries of conversations and debates within the Church to settle on a final, consensus articulation.  She pejoratively describes this process as "debates and fights and power trips."  Okay.  But that does not doctrine was dictated by the Emperor with "dissenting voices" "shut down."  She does not make clear how these "debates and fights and power trips" differ from the kind of "conversation" she advocates all over this book.  

"Constantine personally invited three hundred or so of the 1,800 bishops in the empire and escorted them, free of charge, to the imperial palace in Nicaea."

Loorz here slanderously insinuates that the Emperor personally cherry-picked the bishops and bought them off by wining and dining them to get their approval of his nefarious plan.  In reality, the Church selected the bishops, many of whom had bitter memories of brutal persecutions by the same soldiers that now welcomed them.  Two of them even came from Persia, Rome's traditional enemy where Constantine had no jurisdiction.

(Loorz says that "patriarchs" wrote the Nicene Creed; the Creed actually came out of a gathering of bishops.  She also expresses indignation that people back then would actually use terms like "patriarch" and "hierarchy," given their negative connotations today... as if she expects people in the 4th century to somehow have a clue about 21st century political speech.)  

"The bishops—all of them male, of course—were to come to agreement about the hotly debated hierarchy of the Godhead nouns, something their Hebrew predecessors never thought about.  Defining the noun-ness of God “correctly” was an ongoing obsession of men with power."

In those days, civic and religious leaders tended to be all or mostly male.  This was not something the Church or the Emperor connived to do for this specific meeting.  Loorz has this thing about languages based on verbs being better than those based on nouns, and she apparently feels that the desire for precision in theological language was "an ongoing obsession of men with power."  I do not know which "Hebrew predecessors" she means.  The prophets?  In any case, she prefers languages other than Latin and Greek, which she has decided are hopelessly patriarchal.  Fine.  But people spoke those languages at the time.  Does she feel they should have used some language she deems better but no one actually spoke?   

The Nicene Creed, of course, contains more than just these oppressive "nouns."  Some of the most significant aspects do concern actions: "was made," "begotten," "came down," "was crucified," "was raised," "proceeds," "is worshiped and glorified," "will come again," and so on.  Indeed, the most important word in the Creed, the one most hotly debated, was an adjective, homoousios. 

  

"The Council of Nicaea didn’t end the rivalry, though.  For another sixty years, the debate over how to arrange the nouns of three entities to describe one God continued.  People were excommunicated, exiled, and even killed over it.  Finally the emperor Theodosius I ended the debate by imperial decree in 380: Nicene Christianity became the official state religion, complete with harsh condemnation of anyone with different ideas of what Christianity looked like, calling them 'mad me' and persecuting them with a 'divine authority.'  The pope commissioned a revised set of Old Latin gospels to be used authoritatively by the Roman Catholic Church.  These were called the Vulgate, meaning 'for the commoners,' which is ironic because the commoners didn’t read Latin—only the priests did."

Loorz attempts to make the work of the early ecumenical councils sound ridiculous, as a silly debate over the arrangement of nouns.  Whatever.  (Insert eye-roll emoji.)  

    Maybe she refers to the schism of the "Oriental" Orthodox, who followed slightly different variations of Christology?  If so, misunderstandings mainly caused this tragedy and it indeed cost many lives.  They seek to heal this separation even today.  But nevertheless there remained more diversity within Orthodoxy than Loorz apparently knows about.  We see that from the different liturgies and missional approaches used, East and West.  But yes, the Empire's attempts to impose uniformity had terrible consequences.    

Loorz does not make clear that with her sentence beginning "the Pope" she is talking about events several centuries later.  The term "Vulgate" refers to the Latin version of the Bible held in common by the Western church.  It has nothing to do with a class distinction between "commoners" and priests.  And for a while Latin did serve as the vernacular language of the people.  It didn't become only for priests until centuries later, and then only in the West.

"In this sanctioned Vulgate version of the New Testament, the decision was made to use verbum (word) to translate logos for the opening hymn of John 1.   Verbum means just one single vocable, the smallest fragment of language that has meaning: a single word.  While it doesn’t make grammatical, contextual, or historical sense, it does make a point.  Word (verbum) fit the objective of the 'single supreme authority' of the now official Holy Roman Empire Church."

Loorz exhibits breathtaking historical ignorance here.  The Holy Roman Empire wasn't formed until around 800 CE around the Frankish Kingdom, in the West.  Neither does Loorz understand the difference between the Eastern and Western Churches.  The bishop of Rome does not take on the title "pope" until 1083.  By then he did not have any authority over the Eastern Church at all.  And I have no idea what she means by "single supreme authority."  Perhaps she got it from the novels of Philip Pullman.

After all, allowing Conversation (sermo) to define the essence of Christ could encourage those dissenting voices to be heard.  No.  They had been effectively shut down.  Word was better.  No back-and-forth, no room for dissent, no changes.  Just the one and only Word, the last word, the capital-W Word.  The inarguable Word, the end-of-discussion Word, the everyone-else’s-word-is-heresy Word.  The hierarchy chooses Word, and so it remains Word. 

This argument sounds just silly, as if everything hinged on one Latin term.  Especially since the original remains the Greek logos.  How can she complain about all this debating and fighting, and then complain about "no back snd forth, no room for dissent, no changes"?!  The Church's understanding of the essence of Christ continued to evolve over centuries.  "No dissenting voices"?! the Ecumenical Councils were vigorous debates between people holding different opinions.  I have in my library shelves and shelves of books offering different opinions about scripture and doctrine, over 2,000 years of vigorous conversation.  

Maybe she imagines that the Church refused to include some particular other "dissenting voices"?  Who, may I ask, does she mean?  Well, due to Loorz' association with people like Hal Taussig, I wonder if she doesn't somehow imagine that the Church should have included the so-called "gnostic Christians" some of whose books Taussig says we need to add to the New Testament.  I don't know.  However, mainstream Christianity separated itself from the gnostic movement for very good reasons long before Nicaea.

One of the things I have learned about people spouting conspiracy theories is that if you don't agree with them they whine about "not being heard."  The Church heard the gnostics loud and clear.  Irenaeus wrote a whole, long book about them and their doctrines, which he carefully studied.  They just refused to go along with them because it would have corrupted the core of the faith.  Maybe the Church did listen very carefully to the voices Loorz wants to include, and just decided not to follow them.    

I admit that I have little grace in my heart for people who get books published and then just willfully get facts wrong, using those errant readings to defame many good people.  She could have easily remedied this by spending an afternoon on Wikipedia.  Indeed the book would have been fine if she just deleted this whole section.  But she needed a scapegoat, I guess.  But if I can't trust her on this, how am I supposed to trust her about anything?  This passage doesn't even help the main argument of her book except to foment resentment and grievance, inventing evil enemies on whom to focus a death-ray of paranoia and rage, and blame for one's problems.  It made me impatient with the rest of her book, especially the pages-long conversation with the deer. 

All that being said, I otherwise mostly enjoyed her book.  And her notion of a "wild church" remains an inspired vision.  The Bible contains a great deal of chronically overlooked nature imagery that we certainly need to recover and lift up.

Loorz is free to go out and form her own religion.  She wouldn't be the first.  She is even free to call it somehow "Christian" or somehow connected to Jesus.  That's been done already too.  (Mormons and some Unitarians call themselves Christian.)  

But there are very good reasons why the Church placed the focus squarely on Jesus Christ and took the time and energy necessary to carefully articulate what this means.  The doctrines she dismisses as the product of a pernicious waste of bad men's time -- the Trinity and the two natures of Christ -- are actually essential and constitutive for Christians and Christianity.  They basically mean God is a community of mutual love and God was uniquely present in creation in Jesus.  In truth these doctrines, had she taken the time to study them at all, actually make her point.  For the communal love of the Trinity is embedded in all creation, and through the human Jesus' divinity we realize our own.  Jesus Christ reveals the radical Presence of God in creation and in humanity.  I would have thought that something Loorz would appreciate.

Of course, she would not likely have gotten any of that from her evangelical church.  Indeed, the meaning of these doctrines has largely been lost to the Western Church.  This is on us.  Her ignorance is understandable, at any rate.

It is the Church's job to recover these doctrines and articulate their deeper and broader meanings.  We need to be about this work and build on it in expressing a faith that does indeed see God's Presence in creation and works to walk on the earth more lightly in humility, thanksgiving, appreciation, listening, reverence, and peace.

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