Looking for Holiness.

 Reorienting Protestant Worship

We recently attended a nearby church.  It was very pleasant, positive, and Progressive (signaled by the prominence of rainbow banners).  They are doing almost everything "right," and attracting an active congregation.  There were some signs of liturgical cluelessness, like how they snuffed the "eternal" peace candle at the end of the service.  But they had a nice mix of new and old hymns, anthems from Godspel and Africa (with a drummer).  The minister wore a black academic robe with a green stole and delivered a coherent sermon on lectionary texts.  It was not all that different from services I used to organize myself, truth be told.

But the thing I missed was... God.  The service was all about us.  I find this to be characteristic of Protestant worship these days, generally.  A few weeks ago I went to a very conservative Presbyterian church, and I observed the same thing.  We have scrubbed our worship of anything remotely numinous, mysterious, awe-inspiring, transcendent, or holy.  It's very bright, friendly, informal, and chatty.  We sing and pray and talk about our feelings, our needs, our desires, our joys and concerns.  Everything feels designed to cater to our preferences.  Everything is dumbed down to make sense to people today.  We do worship "lite:" tastes great and less filling.

Christian worship, from its Jewish beginnings, brought together synagogue and Temple.  Protestantism, no doubt reacting against the medieval Roman Catholic going overboard with the latter, and taking 2 Kings 22-23 with a vengeance, always emphasized the former.  Our sanctuaries even look like synagogues, with the central pulpit and lack of imagery, with all attention on the Book.  We don't have anything we are willing to call an altar, and even the Communion Table seems extraneous a lot of the time (since we've reduced the eucharist to once-a-month).  We intentionally come to church mainly to hear something.  These days it seems like we want most to hear from ourselves.

We have largely lost the Temple sensibility, with its humble submission before the Great Mystery.  Without recognizing or admitting it, we pray like the Pharisee in Jesus' parable, congratulating God for having the foresight to create us.  Who would ever depart from a Presbyterian service convinced, like Prince Vladimir's emissaries in Constantinople a millennia ago, that they had experienced heaven?  Our services are so this-worldly we can't lift our eyes above the horizontal.  

Many of our services even lack a Prayer of Confession or Wholeness, and certainly have nothing approaching a Kyrie where we collectively ask for God's mercy.  "Supplication" isn't even in our liturgical vocabulary anymore.  We pray for benefits: health, justice, peace, guidance, comfort in sorrow.  We give thanks for our lives, environment, and situation.  We might ask to be made more forgiving, compassionate, generous.  But we are less and less comfortable praying to be forgiven.  We are slow to articulate our own guilt, complicity, accountability, and grief over what we have done or not done.  We simply do not stand in awe of the living God, let alone in the phobos that is the beginning of Wisdom, Sophia.  We have no sense of God's otherness or majesty.  No inkling of God's wildness. 

I am not advocating escapism, but encounter.  I don't seek the transactional, but the transcendent.  Worship of the living God should be revelatory, apocalyptic, and, well, dangerous.  I used to say a prayer in my heart before rising to deliver a sermon, asking for the miracle that God's Word be delivered through me and that I not be destroyed in the process.  Perhaps I should have said that out loud.  In 1 Corinthians 11, Paul talks about the Lord's Supper in a way completely incomprehensible to us.  "Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be answerable for the body and blood of the Lord.  Examine yourselves, and only then eat of the bread and drink of the cup.  For all who eat and drink without discerning the body eat and drink judgment against themselves.  For this reason many of you are weak and ill, and some have died.  But if we judged ourselves, we would not be judged.  But when we are judged by the Lord, we are disciplined so that we may not be condemned along with the world."

A lot going on there.  Apparently, some in Corinth were treating the Lord's Supper like an informal potluck appended to the service.  The very idea that unworthy participation in the Sacrament could have negative health effects or even be lethal is beyond our capacity to imagine.  Ironically, this formed the core of early Presbyterian views of the Sacrament.  John Knox's eucharistic prayer had basically the Words of Institution and a long and dire warning against unworthy participation.

The idea that worshiping God is supremely consequential, indeed, the most consequential thing a human can do, is foreign to people thoroughly marinated in the flat, disenchanted, secularism of Modernity.  Jesus says that people called to God's banquet may still be rejected if they fail to dress appropriately for the occasion.  I wonder if the proper attire for entrance into God's Presence isn't awe and humility.  If we come into a worship service as if it is all about us, assuming our own privilege and acceptance, convinced that what matters is our convenience and comfort, designed to appeal to my personal taste, that this is "my church"?  Well, a lot of our churches are "weak and ill, and some of [them] have died."  And now we can worship at home in our pajamas on Zoom while looking at our phones and eating pancakes....

In our worship American culture collides with the Kingdom of God.  Our superficial, trivial, temporary, and commodified culture meets Truth, Goodness, Beauty, and Eternity.  Wendell Berry suggests that resistance to the secular Machine means we "every day, do something that won't compute."  At its heart, worship itself does not compute; to the Modern world it is indistinguishable from superstition, a waste of time based on ignorance.  That's why we have to work to make it "worthwhile" according to the valuations of the world.  We have to make it entertaining, educational, inspirational, and motivational, a place for making social connections, for inspiring activism.  People need to know they will "get something out of it."  We want to feel their time was well spent.  Like any manufactured product, worship must be thoroughly domesticated and made consistent and predictable.  That's what "computes," that's what has market value, that's what we feel good about. 

So maybe what I am looking for is useless worship, an utterly pointless experience that does not compute, something with no immediate redeeming social value at all.  Something risky that costs me everything from which I gain nothing.  Something that might kill me.  One quote from Dietrich Bonhoeffer that continues to challenge me since I read it in 1972 is when he said that when Christ calls a person he bids them "come and die."  "Yes!" I remember my 17 year-old self exclaiming at that.  

Bonhoeffer introduced me to a consequential Christianity.  It's a life and death thing.  Worship is a life and death thing.  In the Bible people can die if they fail to approach God with sufficient respect.  We should come into the sanctuary roughly as we would approach a shining ball of plutonium, or an unleashed lioness.  "It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God" (Hebrews 10:31).  We should feel a need to surround ourselves with protective gear, like the Earth's atmosphere filters deadly solar radiation, converting it into the source of life.

Over the centuries the Church developed some practices designed to prepare us for the awesome encounter with holiness.  Most of these were offloaded by Protestants centuries ago.  We didn't see any biblical warrant for them... but they also were not convenient or useful for existence under the individualistic consumer culture then in formation.  So in our self-righteous iconoclasm we largely ignored if not ridiculed them.  They became superficial marks of our smug differentiation from Catholics.  Among these were making the sign of the cross, kneeling, the imposition of ashes, venerating icons, bowing, anointing with oil, silence, splashing with Holy Water, burning incense, fasting, celebrating saints' days, addressing Mary, performing prostrations, making pilgrimages, praying at certain hours, offering blessings, respecting relics, and of course, sharing in a ritual purporting to be eating the body and drinking the blood of Jesus.  All of these are scandalous to most Protestants and coincidentally to Modernity.  They don't compute.  They don't produce material profit for anyone.  We mock some of them as idolatrous or self-flagellatory.    

Some things we did retain, like Sabbath-keeping and Psalmody, corporate confession and prayer.  We kept only those Sacraments Jesus specifically authorized, often in a very stripped-down and thin form.  (I once witnessed a Presbyterian baptism in which the water was barely more than a rumor.)  Most of all we cherished Scripture and sought to shape our lives by it.  

All such spiritual practices are inherently counter-cultural.  Yes, they can be done by rote, reflex, and habit, without consciousness or meaning.  But done with intention, they make tangible a break with "the world."  They don't compute.  They separate us from a domination system that demands we live by craving money, attention, and power.  Instead, through them we humbly draw closer to God and God's Kingdom.  They testify to our need to dwell here in humble awe and gratitude for a universe charged with the immense grandeur of the Creator. 

The early Church understood that it had to convey catechumens out of a Roman culture based on exploitation and violence, and into something very different and contradictory to it.  It required a journey of turning from a counterfeit and exploitive source of meaning to the real One.  Sadly, we have no such sense today.  The very idea that we have somehow to separate ourselves from American culture or Modernity generally in order to enter into God's holy Presence would gain almost no traction even from Progressives.  I mean, a minister can thoroughly exhaust her political capital just getting the US flag out of the sanctuary.  But the idea that our baptismal renunciation of "all evil and its power in the world" means non-participation in our particular manifestation of empire?  Good luck.  Maybe the real reason we eschew those spiritual practices is that we know not only that they don't compute, but that they counter-compute.  They would cost us our success, our reputation, our wealth, and our influence.  They would make us look at least weird and at most like a mortal threat to the powers-that-be.

Increasingly I believe the ultimate center of Christian worship, the place we most need to appear which is also the most dangerous place of all -- our Holy of Holies -- is the Lord's Table.  Karl Barth placed the Table at the center as the place not only of Eucharistic celebration but also of Baptism and preaching the Word.  The Table is the place of our transformation, which is to say, our death... and the birth of Christ within us, the emergence of our true nature.

We come away from the Table, having been fed by the Lord's Body and Blood, as different people.  We resist the collapsing order by living lives informed by the spirit and teachings of Jesus Christ, whose body we are.  We emerge to embody the good news of a different world being born among us.  We anticipate and inhabit that new world by feeding, healing, forgiving, liberating, and welcoming all, beginning with those judged by society as the least.  This is all the fruit of our transformation which happens when we encounter the Holy One in worship.

Maybe if we act like God is holy our bodies will remember.  Maybe if we go through the motions of spiritual practices, rather than waiting for our egos to be convinced about their efficacy and value, it will resonate with something, some wonder and awe that persists in the created matter of which our bodies are made.  Maybe if we repeat words we don't fully understand or agree with, and remember stories we long dismissed as quaint fables or erased in a fit of deconstruction... maybe if we actually let ourselves feel something, something real, something infinitely bigger than ourselves, something beyond our ability to grasp and know... we will find ourselves finally known, finally forgiven, and finally home.

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The Road to the Presbyterian Future Goes Through Iona.

The other day someone asked in a meeting, "Does the PCUSA have a future?"  I impulsively responded that the road to any Presbyterian future "goes through Iona."  It sounded good, but later I had to wonder what I could have meant by that.

I have visited Iona three times.  This small island off the west coast of Scotland serves as a place of informal pilgrimage for me.  It takes two ferries and two buses to get there from Glasgow, usually with an overnight stay in Oban (where you can enjoy excellent Scotch right from the distillery).  

St. Columba established an important monastery on Iona in the 7th century CE from which monks ventured out to evangelize the native peoples of what is now Scotland.  Since Presbyterianism arose there first (albeit almost a thousand years later), many of us consider the place an essential element of our spiritual heritage.  The monastery lay in ruins when a Church of Scotland pastor named George MacLeod organized its rebuilding in the mid-20th century.  After burning out from his exhausting ministry with poor and working people in Glasgow, MacLeod took a trip to the Holy Land.  He found his soul rejuvenated by a mystical experience he had while attending the Orthodox Divine Liturgy in Jerusalem, on Pascha (Easter).  

MacLeod's contact with the mystical roots of Christianity drives him to the ruined old monastery on Iona.  His rebuilding of the monastery expresses a resistance to the dominant culture which forced it into decay and dereliction.  That neglect symbolizes Modernity's systematic trashing of all spiritual traditions, including those grounding Christianity, a demolition felt as well in the ruined lives of people in the coal-choked inner city.  MacLeod's reconstruction opened the way to a deep wisdom and compassion that had largely been forsaken.     

My conviction that the road to any meaningful future for the PCUSA goes through Iona means first driving our roots deeper into the Christian tradition of spirituality and mission, to tap nutrients we turned off long ago.  Should we choose to listen, Iona remains a voice for Presbyterians (and by extension to all old-line Protestants).  Iona opens a series of "portals" through which we may gain energy to equip and feed us for the next phase of our own denominational peregrination.  I interpret Iona less as a delightful, tranquil, and spiritually powerful physical place, and more as a vibrant, multi-faceted metaphor to talk about getting ourselves outfitted with the resources we need to propel us forward.

The Ruins.

MacLeod found on the island a pile of disconnected stones with a few walls still standing here and there.  That's what Modernity did to the old abbey, and British monasticism generally, starting with the demolition work of King Henry VIII.  As such it represents the whole Western church at this end of Modernity: the result of a 500-year acid-bath in Modern culture.  Will Presbyterianism -- and old-line Protestantism generally -- continue on its trajectory towards oblivion, and eventually appear as nothing more than a barely remembered, inaccessible, disintegrated shell, and historical relic?

MacLeod reminds me of the vision of another saint, Francis of Assisi, who had a dream about a ruined church.  Taking it literally, he began to repair the physical church of San Damiano, near his home.  His work became a metaphor for the spiritual renewal he would bring to the larger Church.  In the same way, the reconstruction of this abbey on Iona may symbolize the renewal of the Church in our own time.  Iona stands for a recovery of the reintegration of worship and prayer with the movement for justice and peace, where we experience the Spirit's wildness and bedrock, woven together with tradition and community, 

This focus on Iona does not mean embarking upon some romantic/sentimental project of "going back" to a supposedly better time. The abbey is not an archaeological dig but a living church, serving a time very different from earlier centuries.  We need rather to feed our sense of mission and ministry from a longer, deeper, and richer tradition.  We need to learn from witnesses who lived prior to 1517, and even since then but in other communities.  Iona then does not appear to us as just a physical or temporal place but also a principle of confluence/convergence, a path out of Modernity, a long disused conduit through which living waters may now flow again.

The "Celtic revival" of our own period can easily sink into a nostalgic escapism.  We could imagine Iona as a Celtic Church Theme Park, where we lose ourselves in reverie for a lost, ancient form of Christianity.  Celtic Christianity may easily become a convenient blank slate on which we may project what we will.  Too much of the vast and exploding literature about Celtic Christianity merely appeals to this gauzy fantasy.  As it happens, the actual sources we do have tend not to support the somewhat hippie vision of Iona.  They show, for one thing, a place where monks practiced an asceticism far beyond the comfort-level of the upper middle-class Westerners who rhapsodize the most about Celtic this and Celtic that.  Iona was also solidly grounded in Orthodox Christianity, even if it happened to evolve outside of Rome's orbit for a while.  

Passing through the portals of Iona means a willingness to see ourselves transformed by a decidedly pre-Modern faith environment.  If our approach to Iona merely reflects our personal aesthetic preferences we will not enter its portals.  They harden into mirrors.

The Modern Age did immeasurable harm to Christianity.  Yet the faith persisted, often as a ruin, frequently inhabited by marginalized and excluded peoples.  One example of this we see in the compilation by a civil servant named Alexander Carmichael of the prayers of the common people living in the Western Isles.  These he collected and published as the Carmina Gadelica, or "Prayers of the Gaels."

They show a deep faith informing and reflected in everyday life and mundane activities of simple, poor working people.  The people's prayer demonstrates a deep awareness of God's Trinitarian Presence in creation.  Indeed, their life was saturated by prayer, which made them particularly attentive to God everywhere.

From this we learn to look for the places even in the ravages of our own time where faith persists.  Even if it seems rather simple and naive to us, God seems to revel in such honesty and trust.  I have seen this kind of devotion in people I have served.  Part of me cringes at the nearly superstitious and quite unsophisticated nature of ordinary people's spirituality.  But I always had to admit that such simplicity had a purity of heart that loved Jesus often more effectively than my over-educated, jaded, critical, superior approach.

Iona gives us access to venerable streams of Christianity... but there remains a filter, for the Reformation did happen, not just as an aberration or detour, but a worthy and necessary movement turning the Church back to the Word: Jesus Christ as attested in Scripture.  Tragically, the Reformation managed to cut off the flow of the deeper tradition, leaving Protestants to scrounge around in the squalid dregs of Modernity for nourishment.  We replaced devotion to the Word of God with an obsession with the Bible alone, a dry dead-end leaving us divided, malnourished, and controlled by academics and managers, not saints.  And finally we caved in to Modernity which infused and permeated our whole movement, corrupting it fatally.

I will talk about Iona in terms of "portals."  These appear as metaphorical windows, gateways to Iona's prior states.  We receive energy and insight from each one that may enrich and inform our own mission today.  We don't have to repeat what these people of the past did, indeed, we can't; but resonating with their energy we may find ways to do something akin to what they did in our own wildly different context.

  

The First Portal.

The first portal of Iona opens us to the spirituality of the medieval Roman Catholic Church and the Benedictine Order.  These monastics lived and prayed on the island for about 500 years.

In the 6th century, St. Benedict instituted a Rule for monastics centering on the values of poverty, chastity, and obedience.  Like Jesus standing up against Satan in the wilderness, monks had to renounce of all kinds of self-gratification and self-reliance, to live instead according to the Word and Spirit of God in community.  They had to go against the values and goals of their society, finding themselves called instead to trust in God together in mutual aid.

They gathered seven times a day for worship, and chanted in Latin the entire Psalter at least once a week, shared the Eucharist daily, provided for themselves, welcomed strangers, and served the local population.

Modernity has fed people a very twisted view of Medieval life and spirituality.  In reality, they had more together than we give them credit for.  We remain indebted to people like Matthew Fox for bringing into our consciousness the work and writings of Medieval mystics like Hildegard of Bingen, Julian of Norwich, and Meister Eckhart, people almost completely ignored even during my own seminary education, only 45 years ago.    

From this portal we learn the value of community, simplicity, self-denial, devotion to the Word, and prayer.  To follow Jesus will always involve renouncing wealth, attention, and power.    

The Second Portal.

This second portal of Iona connects us to the days of St. Columba, St. Adomnan, and others, monks who arguably "saved civilization" during the Dark Ages.  They copied and preserved manuscripts, including magnificent illuminated Bibles and Gospel Books.  They probably wrote the famous Book of Kells on the island.

The so-called Celtic Church cultivated a monastery-centric Christianity.  Abbots and Abbesses seem to have exercised more authority than the ceremonial official bishops.  Monasteries took a generally circular shape, enclosing in an earthen berm individual huts for monks, along with a church and other communal buildings.  They often and regularly worshiped out of doors.

These Christians invariably followed the Orthodox faith articulated at Nicaea and the other ecumenical councils.  They worshiped according to a version of the Gallican Rite, developed in what is now France.  They never lost or even questioned their loyalty to Rome and its Bishop, the Pope, even though Rome had retreated into an extended period of internal reorganization at this time.  When Rome got its act back together, the Celtic Church, after some intense negotiation, fell into line.  They were never anything but Catholic.

This portal opens us to the spirituality and theology of the Eastern Church, which are very often different from many of the standard approaches of the West.  They have a much less problematic and harsh understanding of Original Sin and the Atonement, for instance, as well as a deeper appreciation for beauty and tradition.    

The monks on Iona inherited their asceticism from their forebears in the Egyptian desert, and sometimes accomplished almost unbelievable feats of physical stress, like spending a night standing with arms outstretched like a cross in a cold river while reciting aloud the entire Psalter from memory.  Rather than mere punishment of the flesh, we could see in this kind of practice a desire for raw, direct, sensory experience of creation.  Asceticism shows a desire to feel truly and fully alive, grateful and joyful amid the holy elements of planet Earth.   

And Iona sent missionaries by sea to the lands that became Scotland and England, as well as to the European continent.  At that time, the Roman Empire had recently collapsed, and pagan migrants from the east flooded across the Rhine and Danube rivers into Western Europe and settled there.  The old Roman Christians had not the resources to respond to this challenging cultural and demographic shift.  So monks from Iona and other Irish monasteries established communities among the people and gradually helped to bring the continent to Christian faith.

From this we learn the importance again of community gathering in cherished places in accordance with tradition, and being sent out in mission and witness.  They cultivate art and preserve learning of all kinds. The Celtic monks teach us that Christianity is an adventure, an exploration of the limits of our souls, minds, bodies, and world.

The Third Portal.

The next portal delivers us to the even less distinct realm of the Druids and even earlier shamanic practitioners who held the island as holy even before the landing of St. Columba and his dozen monks.  We have little reliable information about pre-Christian Irish spirituality.  But the Church might learn how the Christian missionaries saw themselves as fulfilling, not destroying and replacing, the prior faith of the people.  There were almost no martyrs in the Irish mission; the people seem to have gradually understood this new faith from the east to be in continuity with and inclusive of what they believed before.  In effect they said to the indigenous faith, "Yes... and...."

Similar stories come to us from the Orthodox mission to the Indigenous peoples in Alaska in the 18th and 19th centuries.  The people grew organically into Christianity rather than having it violently imposed upon them.  The mission also sided with the ordinary people against Russian business and military interests.  In other words, they showed an approach rather different from the imperialist/colonialist character of most Western missionary activity among indigenous peoples.

The Celtic mission in Europe appears to have behaved similarly, establishing small communities among the pagan tribes and simply living the gospel in an exemplary and attractive fashion.  Eventually they earned the trust of their neighbors and gained converts.  (Of course, in those days if you could convert the local chief or king you were golden.)  Gods and goddesses were sometimes conflated with saints, like Brigid.  The Christians adopted the basic calendar of their predecessors, including some holidays, reimagined versions of which made it into general observance in western Christianity, like All Saints' (Samhain) and Candlemas (Imbolc).        

One lesson here is to respect and build on what a culture gives, drawing out the best to preserve, improve, and extend, realizing that God left no culture without God's Presence.  Neither was God absent even from Modernity, which obviously has many positive things to offer us going forward.  

A second lesson appreciates the earth-centeredness of the pre-Christian faiths.  Like the Magi from the east who visited the infant Christ, they paid deep attention to nature in stars, sea, seasons, weather, plants and animals, and even supernatural beings.  The Christians also understood the "thin places" among them where the curtain between the living and the dead were more porous.  All creation was charged with God's grandeur and in some sense alive and enchanted.  Life is inherently sacramental.          

The Fourth Portal.

Finally, geologists suggest that Iona is one of the oldest pieces of exposed rock on the planet.  St. Columba did not know this when he prophetically referred to the island as the first land God created.  The fourth portal has us step onto the very rock that emerged from the primordial ocean.  The earth herself caused this up-thrust of ancient stone into the sunlight and air.  Eons before this, "the old eternal rocks" on which monks would build the Abbey hunkered and groaned miles below the surface.  So even the bedrock changes and moves.  So the Creator made this planet alive and active, always in motion, always becoming.         

From this we learn that change is a given, different things happen according to different times and schedules; the balance between continuity and transformation must be maintained.  We see an impermanence even in the most stable bedrock.  And everything is not only alive, but charged with the Word and Spirit of the Creator. 

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I wonder if the light that comes to us now through the portals of Iona may illuminate the Church as it lurches forward into what looks increasingly like a dark time.  Do we, surveying the smoking wreckage of Modernity on a distressed planet and with dysfunctional economic and political institutions, find ourselves at a juncture similar to the centuries following the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West?  Need we to call our circle to gather as on a holy island apart, where the Word and Spirit of the living God may equip us in forming an alternative polity, a community of trust and love, witnessing to the Kingdom embodied and proclaimed by Jesus Christ?

This light energizes in us a commitment to both spirituality and social justice, tradition and contemporary context, mind and body, doctrine and practice, action and contemplation, and an embrace of the network of interwoven communities, cultural and natural, in which God finds us and we find ourselves and each other.  

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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.

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