If we do not listen carefully, humbly, and respectfully to how marginalized people receive the gospel, we wander off track into our own fantasies.
An African-American Pastor friend of mine told me something interesting the other day. Reflecting on the spiritual, "I'm Gonna Sing When the Spirit Says Sing," she noted that the next verse says "shout." Most people assume it means an audible, verbal shout. But in her tradition, which actually produced spirituals in the first place, "shout" actually means a dance. In fact, many individual worshipers have their own individual "shout," a personal, physical movement they do when moved by the Spirit in worship.
If you do not participate in this tradition you will have no idea of this special meaning of the word "shout." Indeed, the meaning could get lost altogether for new generations unfamiliar with the practice.
I immediately thought of how this illustrates the tenuous a grip we have on the meaning of words in the New Testament. At a remove of 2000 years, how many words could have specialized meanings known only to Christian worshipers at the time? And often for the same reason: that they constituted an oppressed, minority community that felt a need to keep a lot of their expressions of faith to themselves? Indeed, how much of the New Testament appears in a kind of code, a network of metaphors that only insiders would get?
This occurs to me as I read a book by a particularly radical New Testament scholar named Robert M. Price. Price and others wonder why we find so little direct criticism of Rome in early Christian writings. We know from other sources that Pontius Pilate routinely committed heinous atrocities in maintaining Roman rule by sheer terror. Why then do the gospels say he tried to save Jesus? Why does Jesus serve a centurion and Peter befriend one? Why does the text present Jesus as so apparently non-resistant to Rome? Price and others seem to imagine the Christian movement as pro-Roman and some even think it a product of Roman propaganda!
But the Romans exacted a steep price for openly criticizing their rule, and, as a marginalized and at-risk community. What if the early Christians consequently underplayed their resistance in their writings? What if they found themselves in a position analogous to African-American enslaved people who had to keep what they really thought and did from the suspicious eyes of the Master and his henchmen? What if criticism of Rome had to appear in code that only those in the community of disciples could decipher?
We see an example of this in the story of the Gerasene demoniac, when the gospel writers refer to his possession by a "legion" of evil demons (Mark 5:9). Ched Myers and others have pointed to this as a subtle dig at Rome, for which "legion" meant a unit of soldiers, making the deranged man a symbol for their people. Myers outlines some of the hidden meanings in many other passages of the gospels that criticize Rome in ways that the authorities at the time might not have picked up on.
I find another example in the famous comment of the Centurion who oversaw Jesus' crucifixion who says "Truly this man was God's Son" (Mark 15:39). We get the report of his words from the women disciples who witnessed the whole thing (Mark 15:40). It makes more realistic sense to hear him as cynically scoffing something more like, "Sure, this loser is God's Son?" with a subtext meaning that this gruesome fate awaits all deluded fools who challenge Rome. But the women hear the soldier saying something he did not intend, accidentally confessing Christ's true identity in the same way that the High Priest had declared that this one man should "die for the people" (John 11:50-51). Both spoke a truth that the Church hears beneath and contrary to the intention of the clueless speakers.
People at the time would have known that the Romans did not use crucifixion for normal criminals but reserved it as a tool of terror, mainly for sedition. This fact alone communicated all that anyone would have to know to conclude that Jesus died at the hands of Rome as a traitor and resistor to them.
Jesus himself says flat-out that he intends that many not understand his parables (Mark 4:11-12). And the early Church met often in secret -- like enslaved African-Americans -- to prevent exposure to their oppressors and masters, who would not like how they worshiped. After all, they worshiped a man whom the Roman authorities executed, but who didn't stay dead, placing him and hopefully them beyond the official terror of the Empire.
The book of Revelation also sounds like an elaborate code with everything standing for and meaning metaphorically something else. If we take that book literally, we completely miss the point. But to the beleagured communities of Jesus-followers to whom John wrote it, it contained a powerful message of hope and encouragement.
The insiders in African-American, or early Christian, worship did not have special, elite, exclusive, intellectual knowledge, like the privileged Romans who subverted the gospel a century or two later, whom we call Gnostics. No, the Gnostics considered themselves superior to the simple, underclass people attracted to the Church, inventing a prohibitively complicated mythology to justify their elitist escapism.
I wonder if safe, wealthy, powerful, and privileged people can really understand the New Testament at all. I doubt it. But finally in the 20th century we did began to listen to the takes of poor, marginalized, victimized, excluded, and suffering people, and heard the New Testament in ways we never imagined before. Indeed, as the Church loses its central and established position in Western and American society, we find ourselves listening to the New Testament in different ways. The more we lose in terms of status and position, the more we can understand Jesus and the writings of his followers. The more we identify with the oppressed, poor, suffering people who wrote these books for each other, the more we may become slightly better at hearing and interpreting the code imbedded therein.
Beyond that, Elizabeth Schuessler Fiorenza, a feminist biblical scholar, points out that a great deal of how the early Church lived would never have made it into print at all. The experience and insight of women largely remained invisible... which makes it all the more remarkable that the New Testament shows women participating in the Church in all kinds of ways, including support and leadership. What appears in texts merely hints at a considerably larger presence in the community. Frankly, only women can perceive this and talk about it. How much of biblical scholarship over the last two millennia consists of what we now call mansplaining?
Does the work of men like Price and others, who claim to present such enlightened, progressive, and liberating readings, fall into this category? Do they just myopically fail to see through the eyes of the oppressed people with whom Jesus identifies and whom he calls to discipleship? Maybe their takes on things merely rehash the usual Modernist, patriarchal line and don't give us anything really radical at all. Maybe such faux radicalism only shores up Empire, patronizingly allowing people to imagine they make a difference when really nothing significant changes.
How can we not arrive at the conclusion that we have exhausted the usefulness of the "sola scriptura" approach to the Bible that has characterized Protestantism from the beginning? Remember how Paul says "the letter kills" (2 Corinthians 3:6)? Maybe only the kind of people whom Jesus identifies in the Beatitudes have the ability to understand him and the writings about him. Maybe they participate in the Spirit that "gives life." Maybe only they can show us the real meaning of "shout," beyond and beneath the written text.
And the practice of Protestants to hand out Bibles to everyone, as if any one could understand and apply its message simply by reading it, regardless of their personal or social situation, now looks kind of crazy. Why would we do that? Unless we hear the Bible with "ears to hear," as Jesus says, we do not have the ability to understand it at all. And to attempt to apply the Bible without such understanding often leads to all kinds of disaster.
As it happens, I just read something by Richard Rohr that hints at this. He -- characteristically -- uses the example of Francis of Assisi, who took on a life of poverty in imitation of Jesus, and thus identified with him and the early Christian community. His example helped to reform the Church then, and challenges us as well. Nothing offends Empire like when people move away from the standard temptations to wealth, admiration, and power. Empire considers the renunciation of any of this, especially money, as at best a laughable demonstration of mental illness.
In any case, scholars who function within the rules and restrictions of Modern historical-critical methodologies, which inherently privilege white, male practitioners, will succeed only in exploring empty and misleading rabbit holes. They may even gain a lot of fame and influence by convincing people of their freedom and radicality. But they will not have or know the code that we only get from actually participating in the circumstances of the life Jesus and his followers lived. For if we do not listen carefully, humbly, and respectfully to how marginalized people receive the gospel, we wander off track into our own fantasies.
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