Amaziah the Republican

In my other life as a newspaper reporter, one of my coolest assignments was going to Denver for a week to cover the Democratic National Convention for the Rocky Mountain News (R.I.P.) in 2008. I mainly live-blogged and tweeted, but I got a couple of print bylines, which was cool, and covered some protests, which was fun. The first event I covered was the first event of the convention, an interfaith prayer gathering, the first ever event at a Democratic convention designed for people of faith.

One of the speakers there changed my view of politics and religion.

Charles E. Blake, presiding bishop of the Church of God in Christ, expressed his frustration with the Democratic Party for its support of abortion. Quoting from my own blog post about his remarks:

Bishop Charles E. Blake, presiding bishop of the Church of God in Christ, called on presumptive Democratic nominee Barack Obama to “follow through on his promise … to reduce the number of abortions” while stopping just short of criticizing the Democratic Party for its support of the practice.

“Surely we cannot be pleased with … millions of terminated pregnancies,” Blake said to applause from the nearly full Wells Fargo Theater. “Something within us must be calling for a better way. If we do not resist at this point, at what point will we resist?”

Democrats must know about the “moral and spirtual pain so many of us feel because of this disregard for the lives of the unborn,” Blake said.

In a speech focusing on society’s responsibility to its children, Blake first focused on the plight of the inner-city poor as a human rights responsibility before calling abortion a practice “that conflicts with our position and our responsibility … to human rights itself.”

Powerful words. Amos-like, even, as he starts with something his party would support, protecting the rights of children, then moves into condemnation of the party’s stance on abortion.

But Blake didn’t just criticize the Democrats.

“Others loudly proclaim their advocacy for the unborn, but they refuse to recognize their responsibility and the responsibility of our nation to those who have been born. They are presently and historically silent, if not indifferent, to the suffering of our inner cities.”

I turned in my paper on Amos yesterday. The assignment was to do an exegesis of an assigned chapter in Amos, then follow that up with an analysis of one or more ethical issues raised by the chapter. I was assigned Amos 7, which actually doesn’t have much in the way of direct ethical condemnation. It contains three visions and a confrontation between the prophet and Amaziah, the high priest of Bethel.

But that confrontation is telling, as in it, Amaziah tells Amos to go back to Judah and prophesy there because Bethel is “the king’s holy place and the king’s royal house.” Amos has presumably spent a year or more criticizing the religious and economic power structures of Israel because of their disregard for and exploitation of the poor, and all Amaziah can say is that he can’t preach there; it’s the king’s place. It’s a sign of how corrupt and self-serving the power centers of Israel’s life had become. They existed to perpetuate the self-comfort of themselves and those like them and evinced no concern whatsoever for the lower classes who suffered under their rule.

Applying that for today, we as Christians are powerful people.

Transgender in the Church

Another day, another crazy fundamentalist saying abhorrent things about gay men and women. First, there was the pastor who advocated physically abusing young children who seemed too effeminate. Now, another has said we should cordon gay people into camps ringed by electrified fences.

I honestly have no idea what to say about this. It should be obvious how unChristian these comments are – such hatred and violence have no place among the followers of Jesus, no matter how wrong one feels homosexuality is. I think most everyone knows that, Christian or not. These comments are so extreme, I hesitate even mentioning them because I fear giving these twisted people the publicity they clearly crave. I see that same hesitation among people like Alise Wright, who frequently stands up for gay people on her blog, and Justin Lee, who lives in the uncomfortable margin between homosexuality and Christianity.

So rather than spend my morning turning exquisite phrases of outrage, allow me to focus on something positive. This weekend, I read an amazing story from The Washington Post‘s Petula Dvorak about a transgender 5-year-old. Yes, you read that correctly.

Was Mary Really a Virgin? Part 8

We’ve spent the first seven parts of this series focused on the New Testament authors and their words about the birth and family background of Jesus. But there are alleged specific Old Testament references as well. By which I mean, we can argue the entire OT points to Jesus, and that we can find types of Christ all over the Hebrew Bible. But I’m thinking of two passages in particular that Matthew cites as pointing toward the specific circumstances surrounding Jesus’ birth.

Matthew 1:23 argues Jesus’ virgin birth fulfills prophecy, and Matthew 2:6 argues his birth in Bethlehem does, as well. Let’s look at those.

We all know that in Matthew 1:23, the author quotes Isaiah 7:14 this way:

“Look! A virgin will become pregnant and give birth to a son, and they will call him, Emmanuel.”

The problem is that’s not what Isaiah says. Or, more accurately, that’s not what Isaiah says in the Hebrew text. Matthew is using the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew, which is sometimes a little spotty in its faithfulness to the original texts. In this case, it takes the Hebrew word for “young woman” and flips it over to the Greek word for “virgin.”

The Evolution of the Bible – and the Evolution of Us

Note: Some of this, especially near the end, is taken from the reading response I turned in very early this morning for my Amos class, but I’ve adapted it heavily for my blog audience.

As I was finishing the reading I needed to do for this upcoming short course on the book of Amos, it struck me that one of the older themes of this blog – seeing God as a multifaceted God of evolution – had cropped back up again.

Scholars disagree on how we got to the current text of Amos, but most agree Amos didn’t just get up and start preaching the words of 1:1, end with the last verse of chapter 9, then go home. Even a literal reading precludes that possibility, as it mixes oracles with visions, includes a narrative of confrontation between Amos and the high priest Amaziah, and seems to assume a significant time lapse over the course of the book. Besides which, we know Amos spoke his prophecies; at some point, they were written down, but we don’t know when or by whom.

Nineteenth-century source criticism was all about trying to uncover the various layers of Amos (and every other book of the Bible). The idea was to isolate the “true” historical Amos underneath the edits and redactions made by future generations compiling his spoken oracles into a single volume. There’s nothing wrong with this, but the problem lies in the assumption of those earliest scholars – the notion that the “true” Amos was more valuable than the rest because it was more historically accurate. That’s very modernist, and it’s very unfair to the text. We have the canonical version of Amos for a reason, however the evolution took place.

On the other extreme, traditional evangelicalism recoils against the notion that Amos is not written by Amos at one tim, in the eighth century B.C.E. The notion of finding “seams” within the text and arguing for a core set of oracles surrounded by later additions is considered heretical to the notion of the inerrant word of God. Such a process in composing the final text seems too … human.

Yet we know God uses humans and their imperfect methods to do his will. Simply because God doesn’t work the way we think he would in delivering his word to us doesn’t mean that’s not what he actually did (triple negative!). In other words, declaring off-limits the possibility of textual evolution doesn’t change the fact that the text did in fact evolve.

The American Amos

As I said before, America needs an Amos. The first Hebrew prophet was an outspoken advocate for the voiceless, and his condemnation of economic inequality, hollow religion and exploitation of the poor could be read almost verbatim into our culture today.

In fact, some people have done exactly that. In M. Daniel Carroll R.’s Amos – The Prophet & His Oracles, he cites a pair of updated Amos prophecies spoken to contemporary America. I’d like to share them here. I’ve copied two, and then written one of my own

I’ve left the first one unchanged. It was written by Ruth E. Frey in 1992 and takes as its source the Oracles Against the Nations of Amos 2. Yet notice how prophetic it truly is.

Good Grief

I was all set to write a rockin’ post about the acceptance of polygamy in the Bible and whether that means the church should  be more accepting of it today – but I stayed up late trying (and failing) to finish my reading for this upcoming Maymester on Amos, and therefore woke up too late to write anything more than this apologetic note.

Fear not, dear readers! After next week, blogging will resume in earnest. Until then, however, I’m afraid activity here will be spottier than it already was. Have a great day!

Was Mary Really a Virgin? Part 7

The conversation about Jesus’ birth obviously did not end with the Bible – nor did the remarkableness of the claim that Mary was a virgin when she was conceived escape notice until the rise of biblical criticism in the 19th century.

Gerd Ludemann, whose book Virgin Birth? The Real Story of Mary and Her Son Jesus, has provided a helpful walkthrough of the relevant scriptures, also cites two apocryphal works as contributing in some way to the conversation.

Dealing with apocryphal and pseudepigraphal works is a little tricky. They’re not in the canon, so they don’t share the same assumptions of truth that their canonical brethren do – rightly so, in my view. Yet they speak to the traditions in place among certain communities at the beginning of the church, just as noncanonical texts ascribing the gospels to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John do.

The Gospel of Thomas is one of the more famous of the Gnostic Gospels, thanks mostly to The DaVinci Code. It consists of largely disconnected sayings of Jesus – some of which are in the Bible, some of which are not – and in No. 105 Jesus says: “Whoever knows the father and the mother will be called the child of a whore.” Other translations have it: “Whoever knows his true father and mother will be called the son of a whore.”

I have no idea what this means.

Oversleeping …

… is a good way not to have a post in the morning. Whoops! We’ll try again Monday. Have a great weekend, everyone!

The Ethics of War (or the Problem With the Prophets)

After a semester off, I’m leaping back into the Old Testament for a week, as I take a Maymester course called Amos and Ethics.

One of the great things I’ve discovered over the course of doing this seminary thing has been accepting and respecting the multivocality of the Bible. It does not speak with one voice, nor was it intended to. It’s the collected understandings of dozens of people over thousands of years as they’ve figured out and written down and passed along their own beliefs in who God is and what he’s doing in the world. And sometimes, certain texts speak more to certain cultures than others.

For example, Revelation speaks more to those undergoing persecution and suffering than to those of us Christians in 21st-century America. Rather, in our comfortable, easy lives, where the church more often than not finds itself supporting politicians who advocate tax cuts for the wealthy and service cuts for the needy, we need an Amos.

Amos doesn’t bar holds. He’s no better than middle class himself, a manager of land and flocks from Judah, and he travels up to Bethel, one of Israel’s two holy sites and begins popping off about their tendency to sell the poor into debt slavery over trifles such as a pair of sandals, about their general oppression of the needy and their use of the courts to stifle complaint from those without the means to grease the wheels of the system. Then he slams the women of Israel, calling them cows, condemning them for living lives of luxury, getting drunk while they cheat and oppress the lower classes.

Yet these same people say they cannot wait for the Lord to come back. “Why do you want the day of the Lord?” Amos asks. “Isn’t the day of the Lord darkness, not light” to those whom Amos addresses? God hates and rejects the worship they bring – their prayers and their offerings. He won’t even look at them or listen to their music. “But let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”

There is much to like about Amos, especially if you feel the system needs reform, and that Christians should play a role in advocating for and implementing such reform to lift up the poor and increase the justice and righteousness our society shows to its most vulnerable.

But here’s the rub: Amos is also a violent book. And we can’t just pick and choose what we like and don’t like from a text. So while liberals love Amos because it focuses on social, legal and economic justice for the poor, it makes us a little squeamish because the God it portrays is “not a warm, comfortable God, but a dangerous and fearsome God who demands accountability.”

Was Mary Really a Virgin? Part 6

So this series is taking longer than I’ve planned, but I’m enjoying it. I hope you are, too. So far, we’ve noticed some problems, though they’re not particularly egregious, with the traditional story of the virgin birth of Christ:

• The earliest surviving Christian writings – Paul and Mark – don’t mention it.
• The two virgin birth narratives we have – Matthew and Luke – are incompatible with each other.
• Mark not only doesn’t mention it, his portrayal of Jesus’ relationship with his family and hometown seems completely unaware of any such supernatural occurrence surrounding his conception, while Matthew and Luke make some strategic edits to rectify this.

These can all be explained to some level of satisfaction if you’re so inclined, but I hope the series so far has provided food for thought. We have just one gospel left, and after that we can delve into some theology and begin asking whether or not the virgin birth is essential for our notion of who Jesus is and why he came here.

John’s birth story is, of course, more of an incarnation story, and most of us can recite it from memory: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. … The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” The sense of “dwelt” is “pitched his tent.” The pre-existent Word, the Son of God, God himself wrapped himself in skin and hung out with us for a while.

Once again using Gerd Lutemann’s book Virgin Birth? The Real Story of Mary and Her Son Jesus as our guide, let’s see what else John says about Jesus’ origins.