The pundits have already started. (Apparently the first rule of punditry is that it would be irresponsible not to speculate irresponsibly.) Chris Matthews wondered whether far-right, anti-tax groups were behind the attack, and right-wing radio host Laura Ingraham is trying to use the bombings to fuel anti-immigrant sentiment. We can safely assume that some of the guardians of the religious right will try to invoke the attacks as evidence of the ill-defined moral or cultural decline at the heart of all our troubles. And I’d be genuinely surprised if we don’t hear dovish Americans speaking of state terrorism, drone strikes, and “chickens come home to roost.”

All of this is understandable, even if it is inexcusable. We all tell stories; we need them. Humans are storytellers and without stories we couldn’t be human. So we can expect that tragic current events will make their way into our stories, because our experiences are either brought into our stories somehow or they are forgotten. And something like the Boston Marathon bombing will not be forgotten. The Boston bombings will make their way into our stories somehow, we  simply do not have any other option.

But the trouble is that shocking, tragic events like the bombings in Boston fall outside the realm of the logic we normally use to tell our stories. What’s tragic is also anomalous. We are not prepared to tell coherent stories about civilians losing their limbs or an 8 year old kid being snatched away from his family by a remotely-detonated explosion. These events are appalling, they are grievous, they do not find themselves at home in our dominant themes or story-lines. We are not equipped to write tragedies because we like to imagine that tragedy is the stuff of fiction or the property of others.

And it’s during our moments of deep loss, emotional barrenness, and psychological torment that the world’s most opportunistic, predatory ideologues make themselves known. My own pastoral advice, if I can be so presumptuous as to offer it, is that you should run like hell anytime you hear someone trying to use a fresh tragedy as fodder for a bigger ideological story. Some folks care more for ideology than people, and they are typically willing to exploit your shock and anger in the service of their pet cause. They don’t care whether you grieve properly and they are perfectly comfortable helping you attach your anger to ideologies and stories completely unrelated to the source of your pain. Let’s call the Laura Ingrahams of the world precisely what they are: fear-mongering practitioners of a predatory psychology.

Of course, it’s not enough to denounce what is wrong, and we can’t avoid stories. We’ll still have to tell stories, but we should do so with the knowledge that not all stories are created equal. The question is: how do we tell stories that are helpful in the aftermath of senseless events? I have a few ideas:

1)    We ought to acknowledge grief on it’s own terms. The actual substance of our grief could never do as much harm as the distortion and co-option of grief into unrelated ideologies. So while grief is difficult to acknowledge head-on, I really believe that direct, honest grief work is the only way we can keep our grief from turning into a destructive fear. Stated very simply, we should grieve first and tell stories later. As we wait for full, accurate information, we can go about the work of preparing ourselves to interpret it without hate clouding our vision.

2)    There’s no need to call a bad thing good. We can name a story as tragic without feeling the need to rope it into “a bigger plan” or a story about suffering and redemption. Undoubtedly someone will ask the theodicy question. “How could God let this happen?” It’s strange that we speak of mass-violence or terrorist attacks as if they were natural disasters rather than human actions, but in the moment we ought to respect those questions since they come from a place of deep anguish. I suppose the correct answer is “I don’t know, but I’m feeling heart-broken, too.” The ambiguous truth is that sometimes people find a “why?” in their tragedy and sometimes they don’t. No one should be pressured to affix a positive meaning to their personal tragedies. Some pains never leave us although they grow duller over time, and sometimes the best people can manage is a “new normal.”

3)    Hate, in any form, is unlikely to help anyone. The problem with stories fueled by such an infectious, powerful emotion as hate is that they have a tendency of taking on a life of their own. A story that individuals started to craft quickly comes to be written by the whims of mass psychology, and before we know it we’re all extras waiting to make our appearance in a theater of war. This means, I think, that we have to confront those who would use grief to fuel hateful ideologies. It also means that we have to resist the urge to hate people who hate people. And for many people of good will that may be the most difficult task of all.

4)    Finally, if you’re a praying person, then you can pray. In the aftermath of this tragedy I’m praying for honest, deep, and bitter grief. And I’m praying that when we’re done grieving, empathy will triumph and hate will wilt and wither away.

I’ve been thinking lately about truth and persuasion and the way we find meaning in texts. It’s the sort of thing you have to think about if you’re a student of the Bible, or really if you’re doing interpretive work of any sort. I’ve been thinking about true interpretation and false interpretation and how it is we try to separate the two. And in doing all of this thinking I couldn't escape the conclusion that rational argumentation is vastly overrated, and that we need to reach beyond rationality if we wish to be persuasive moral agents. These are a few of my reflections and conjectures.

I. The Bible Usually Means What We Assume It Means

Let me share with you some of the worst interpretive work to which I’ve ever been subjected. It comes from David Barton, and it’s based off of the Parable of the Workers, which goes like this:

The Kingdom of Heaven is like a man, a boss, who went out in the morning to hire workers for his vineyard. Having bargained with the workers for $48 a day, he sent them into his vineyard. Going out again about 9 A.M., he saw others standing around doing nothing in the village square. He said to them, “You go out to my vineyard, too, and I’ll pay you whatever’s fair.” So they went.

Going out at Noon and at 3 P.M., he did the same thing. About five o’clock he found others standing around, and he said to them, “Why are you standing around doing nothing?” They said to him, “Because no one has hired us.” So he said to them, “You, too, go out to my vineyard.”

When evening came, the boss said to his foreman, “Call the workers in and pay them their wages, from the last hired to the first.” And those hired around five o’clock each got $48. The first hired thought they would get more, but they each got $48. Picking up their pay, they started grumbling at the boss, saying, “Those last ones you hired worked only an hour, and you paid them what you’re paying us, who’ve worked all day long under the hot sun!” But he answered them “Friend, I do you no wrong. Didn’t you bargain with me for $48 a day? Take what’s coming to you and get out! Suppose I do decide to pay the last the same as you; can’t I do what I want with my own? Is your nose out of joint because I am generous? (Matt. 20: 1—15.)*

Alright, so what’s that mean? Get ready to pull your hair out a little bit. David Barton says this passage is very clearly discouraging minimum wage laws and labor unions. The employer pays his employees whatever he deems to be fair without any pesky intervention from government or needing to fuss with collective bargaining processes. It’s right there in the story.

A while ago I preached a Labor Sunday sermon on this parable. I said that setting actual economic policy according to the parable of the workers would be like gardening according to the parable of the mustard seed, and that we are probably missing the point of the parable if we’re talking about literal workers and bosses. My own theological understanding is that parables operate at a more basic level. They try to disrupt our own everyday logic with the logic of God’s gracious giving. We might use this passage to draw conclusions about the way workers ought to be treated, but those conclusions would come from a deeper insight about the nature of God and the worth of humans.

What Barton did is called eisegesis, which is, speaking in technical terms, a big no-no. Eisegesis means reading meaning into a text rather than drawing it out. An eisegete is someone who uses the notoriety or prestige of a text to bolster their own pre-existing agenda. Of course, to do that sort of thing you have to be either incredibly dishonest or shockingly lacking in self-awareness. Eisegesis is, most of all, rude. It completely disregards the author’s context and intentions. Barton, here and elsewhere, is a poster boy for Eisegesis.

But here’s the thing; I’m not sure that the rest of us are doing much better. A more rigorous, honest engagement with a text is called exegesis, and everyone in their own mind is an exegete. I’m led to believe, though, that the difference between eisegesis and exegesis depends largely upon context and group consensus. In other words, no one actually knows what a text means.

There is literary theory to suggest as much (meaning happens in the exchange between author and reader and all that), but I tend to think about the issue in more sociological terms. Consider that probably millions of Americans consider David Barton to be a brilliant biblical scholar. Are they wrong? Well, that’s probably not a terribly useful question. Nearly everyone with whom I associate would say Yes, they are wrong. We would say that they are anachronistic thinkers, that their preferred interpretive work clearly doesn’t meet the standards of real biblical scholarship, that they are maybe a little bit detached from reality. And all of that is fine and good and probably true. But it is also true that David Barton and David Barton’s fans do not care if they meet your standards or not, because they are staunchly convinced that their standards are, in fact, the correct standards.

Do you see how this works? Why do faith traditions or schools of academicians accept some interpretations and reject others? And why is there such variety depending on context? It is not as if the theology of The United Methodist Church or the methodology of historical critical scholarship is in some way objective. Hermeneutics can’t be verified by mathematical proofs. They depend, instead, on social consensus; what else?

I don’t mean to say that there’s no way of telling which interpretations are better than others (I’ll take that up later), but what I am saying is that we are all on similarly shaky, subjective footing when it comes to doing the work of interpretation. The meanings we draw out of text depend in large part upon the sort of assumptions we make before we start reading. The Bible usually means what we assume it means.

II. The Power of Detail

Something else is happening, too.  What I just described is a “top down” interpretive scheme. The big, general assumptions we make about theology or the nature of the Bible affect the way that we draw meaning out of particular passages. So we find the universal in the particular. David Barton finds his own particular mix of conservative Evangelicalism and Libertarian social and economic thought in the Parable of the Workers. But we don’t always move exclusively from the general to the particular. Actually, the way we think about general themes and particular details is more like a feedback loop. Our small interpretive details tend to bolster much larger themes.

So now I’ll leave David Barton alone and talk about some religious thinkers I actually like, but let’s stick with the Parable of the Workers. It just so happened that I ran across the Parable of the Workers in two different sources the other day—David Buttrick’s book Preaching the New and The Now and William Sloane Coffin’s collected Riverside Sermons. Buttrick and Coffin treat the parable in mostly similar ways. Here’s Buttrick:

The parable is designed so that we look at the opening scene objectively, but, having heard of a pay agreement and talk of “fair pay,” we join the grievance committee and are trapped in the unfolding “plot” of the parable. Deeper still, our conventional fair-play world (with a conventional fair-play God) has been disrupted when the bottom-of-the-barrel workers are paid exactly the same as the industrious workers.

And now Coffin:

What the workers were complaining about…was something that haunts each one of us: it is the fear that somewhere, someone might be getting away with something….The parable really opposes two deep-seated views of human existence, two worlds, if you will, between which we go back and forth like a shuttlecock on a loom. They are the world of merit and the world of grace.

In both treatments of the parable, the same structure and themes are in place. And that’s mostly unsurprising. Buttrick and Coffin shared much in the way of background, training, and ideological sensibilities. So both read the parable as a statement about the grace of God, a grace which does not operate according to human notions of transactional fairness.

But look a little bit closer. This Parable of the Workers, as it appears in Scripture, has a lot of unspoken details. Those five o’clock workers, the ones who do only an hour of work but receive a full day’s wages, what are they like? Well, whoever wrote the Gospel of Matthew doesn’t say, but Buttrick and Coffin both have their hunches. Buttrick says the five o’clock workers are “bottom-of-the-barrel workers.” They are “the riffraff, the drinkers, the goof-offs.” Coffin has a different intuition. He says of the workers, “The fact that they remained all day was an indication of how desperately they wanted to work, for if they went unemployed for even one day they went home to worried wives and hungry children.” So where the Bible is silent preachers and theologians tend to fill in the gaps. Buttrick sees riffraff and Coffin sees good workers who can’t catch a break.

Does it make a difference whether the five o’clock workers are good or bad? Both preachers, after all, come to very similar conclusions about the grand meaning of the parable. These exegetical particularities may not seem all that significant in isolation, but I think they start to gain importance if we back up a bit.

Buttrick’s bad workers and Coffin’s good workers serve to bolster some of the bigger themes that show up in each of their bodies of work. Buttrick’s book is concerned throughout with society’s “losers”—the people absolutely no one has time for. Preaching the New and The Now sketches out a vision of God’s New Social Order, a state of affairs in which society’s “losers” are reintegrated and treated as equals. Coffin’s work tends to focus more on society’s structural injustices. Nearly all of his writing and speaking intertwined theological elements with fairly overt left-leaning political sensibilities. The good workers are at home in Coffin’s worldview. They would like nothing more than to feed their families, yet are not given the chance. Of course, these two distinct emphases from Buttrick and Coffin are not necessarily in tension, it’s just that they are distinct. For both writers, little exegetical details such as the character of the five o’clock workers serve to bolster the sensibilities that show up throughout the entirety of their work. The general and particular are locked into a feedback loop.

This feedback loop is why interpreters with differing viewpoints can rarely reach common ground. The big themes are assumed and the little details come to be shaped in such a way as to support the big themes. The system is closed unless something can change its inner workings.

III. To What Shall We Cling?

I’ve tried to strike a blow to the notion that some interpretations are true simply by virtue of being in alignment with certain methodologies or sets of interpretive assumptions. As much as it pains me to admit, I have no objective grounding to claim that William Sloane Coffin’s interpretive work is more true than David Barton’s. My preference for Coffin over Barton is, after all, just a preference. And that leaves me with something of a problem. As a minister I’m supposed to have deeper theological grounding than “I happen to personally like this.” How will I justify my claims?

It seems to me that our ability to make truth claims depends almost solely on our ability to build social consensus. I haven't seen much evidence that ideological squabbling can build consensus, so I guess we'll have to look elsewhere. Unfortunately we can't do the easy thing, because one of the easiest ways to bring about social consensus is to hate people.  Fred Craddock once preached that

there is nothing more powerful if you love applause than to play upon the hatreds and the prejudices of people. Draw them out, say their hatreds for them and then receive the accolades. In fact, in some quarters it is called conviction. And it generates enthusiasm to be clear about who's wrong, who's under judgment, who is outside.

Hate is easy and Hate is for cowards, but Hate can gather a crowd in a hurry. Hate is always a trustworthy way to bring about truth claims through social consensus.

The truth is that we need to focus less on truth claims, because our truth claims are always at least partially flawed. Would you like to know what truth is? I think I have a pretty good guess. Truth is all of our love and hate and connection and insecurity wearing a tattered costume we call reason. Our justifications, our methodologies, our formal logic, appeals to authority, all of that stuff is secondary. A deeper-seated emotional conviction is primary. Maybe those rational defenses we build up are important. It is important, or at least oftentimes necessary, to give coherent, orderly accounts of ourselves. But it's foolish to think we can change minds without first changing hearts.

If we wish to be effective in moral persuasion, then the only rational thing to do is to forget about rationality. Underneath all of our robust theorizing is usually a simple conviction or feeling, and it's those feelings that bind us together so we can build truth around social consensus. And it's here that I think we can finally make claims about which sorts of truths are better than others. Morally superior truths are those which are built upon the sorts of shared emotions we would wish for ourselves and our own. All I can really claim, finally, is that love is superior to hate.

I think most of us know from our own lives that moral persuasion comes about through experiences of empathy. It's when we're bothered by the hurt of another that we finally stop holding positions that bring about their suffering. In other words, no one is moral alone. And the point is, most everyone else is just like us. We build up the rational walls surrounding our positions all the more feverishly when we are under siege. But then one day the siege stopped and someone approached us quietly and sincerely and unarmed. And they made themselves vulnerable and said, "this is hurting me."

Moral persuasion doesn't begin with "you are wrong." It starts with "this is hurting me."

*This translation of the Parable of the Workers comes from David Buttrick's book. It's mostly NRSV with a few swapped-out words.

These taxpayer-funded social programs are, depending on which subgroup you ask, either a faithful extension of Jesus’ commandment to care “for the least of these” or a form of legalized theft meant to prop up society’s most immoral moochers at the expense of the righteous. Surely the difference of opinion will be resolved shortly.

Right, so, actually no. This is one of those intra-Christianity feuds that make you wonder how two groups of such differently minded people could possibly claim to follow the same Messiah or read the same scriptures.

Stop me if you’ve ever heard an argument that went something like this:

Liberally-inclined Christian: Any budget that is balanced on the backs of society’s most unfortunate is immoral. Jesus was very clear in his commandment to care for the sick and poor among us.

Conservatively-inclined Christian: Of course we should provide poor and sick people with charitable assistance, but Jesus gave those commands to individuals. You’ll destroy the possibility of charity if the government starts supplying everyone’s needs through coerced extraction.

End scene.

This argument is all over the place. It even happens in the halls of Congress, because apparently the memo about separation of church and state never reached most of our elected officials. A few months ago, Politico reported on a telling exchange between two congressmen.

As a young father, Rep. Joe Baca had himself relied on food stamps, and during the House Agriculture Committee debate, the California Democrat emotionally invoked the Gospel of Jesus feeding hundreds from a few fish and loaves of bread. Rather than sympathy, this brought a sharp rebuke from Rep. Steve Southerland (R-Fla.). “Nowhere in Scripture did God give instruction to government over us as the individual,” said the Christian conservative. “Read it, sir. He was speaking to individuals not governments.”

Wait, why are two members of the House Agricultural Committee bickering about Jesus?

They aren’t. This is an argument about the way in which a modern democratic republic ought to arrange part of its political economy. Is it moral for the federal government of the United States of America to provide its citizens with a social safety net?

Strangely enough, Jesus never answered that question in much detail. But He is God incarnate, so it’s generally a plus if He’s on your side. So Representatives Baca and Southerland invoke Jesus in the hopes of tying their positions into America’s common religio-cultural consciousness. The perception of divine sanction never hurt anyone’s political program.

Truthfully, I wish these sorts of arguments would go away. The Bible shouldn’t be treated as an oracle that reveals to us the ideal social and economic policies for current-day American society. Attempting to do so usually results in bad policy and worse religion. That’s how we got slavemasters waving Bibles over their heads in defense of the moral appropriateness of an evil institution. It would be good if we could stop doing that sort of thing.

Unfortunately, these sorts of arguments tend to not go away. What happens, instead, is that people find new ways of thinking about the Bible. We recognize the limitations placed on the Bible’s authors by their cultural and political context, or the ways in which we've read our own interests into the text. Better religion yields better policy.

I think we need some more incisive religious thinking as relates to the Bible and economy. My argument here is not “we should arrange our government in this or that way because the Bible says so.” What I’m saying is that there are certain ways of thinking about politics and economics that cannot be supported very easily by the Bible.

The economic libertarianism of Christian conservatives that claims all taxation is theft does not hold up terribly well to the scrutiny of biblical perspectives on money and governance. On the other hand, the redistributive policies favored by liberal Christians find themselves right at home in the world of the Bible.

Representative Steve Southerland is right in saying that Jesus spoke to individuals, not governments. Considering the historical situation in which Jesus lived, that shouldn’t be surprising. Jews were second-class citizens under Roman imperial rule. Their opinions on governance would have counted for nothing.

Most of us, of course, as citizens of a democratic republic, have a (very small) direct say in the way in which we are governed. In that sense, conservatives are probably correct in saying that Jesus’ words should not be taken as public policy directives in modern America.

Conservatives stretch their biblical credibility, however, in staking out the position that taxation or redistribution are not morally acceptable. One of my favorite moments of Messianic sassiness comes when Jesus addresses the question of whether or not Jews should pay taxes to the Roman government.

There is no doubt that the Roman government was unfairly oppressing Jesus and his people. The Romans were known to tax their subjects at a rate of up to 80%. Certainly plenty of 1^st Century Jews did not feel it was God’s will that they have their earnings extracted by the Roman imperial tax. They would have been justified in raising the Tea Party’s “Don’t Tread on Me” flags.

So it is in this context that Jesus is asked whether or not Jews should pay the Roman imperial tax, and I love his response. He has someone  bring him a Roman coin and then he asks, basically, “Who’s face is on this? And who’s inscription?” The answer, of course, is Caesar. Then comes the line that everyone remembers and tries to interpret without reference to the previous exchange: “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and Render unto God that things that are God’s.”

At this point everyone wants to ask, “Alright, well, how much legitimately belongs to Caesar/The U.S. government?” Can Caesar take only up to 10%, which is no more than the tithe that God requests? Surely no one should be paying the top marginal tax rate of 35%! I personally like Dorothy Day’s treatment of the question, which went something like, “If we rendered unto God everything that belonged to God, then there wouldn’t be anything left for Caesar.”

But I think all of that completely misses the point of what Jesus was saying. Try framing the scenario in a modern context. A small business owner approaches Jesus and says, “how much of my money should I be paying to the government?” And then Jesus says something like, “Bring me a one dollar bill. Who’s face is on it, and who’s inscription?”

The small business owner says, “George Washington and it says ‘Federal Reserve Note.’” Whether it’s one of Caesar’s coins or a dollar bill, the implications are the same. That money isn’t yours. It belongs to the ruling authority. Just look, their name is on it. In our context, the Federal Reserve issues currency on behalf of our government. It’s the government’s money, they just let you use it in order to participate in the economy that they lend a structure to through a system of laws enforceable through the power of the police. If hard-right conservatives wish to claim that all taxation is theft, then they ought to cease interacting with anyone who benefits from the government or uses the government’s currency. (Hint: that’s not possible.)

Jesus, besides being pretty blatantly and virulently anti-wealth, didn’t seem to be terribly interested in the details of Roman public policy. Even disregarding the fact that Jesus was not in a place socially to influence his own governance, we cannot in good faith look to the life or teachings of Jesus as a way of formulating modern economic policies.

The rest of the New Testament—all of the books besides the Gospels, I mean—aren’t likely to bolster the conservative case either. Christianity would eventually come to hold a place of public influence in the Mediterranean world, but that was not until long after early proto-Christians wrote and compiled their scriptures. The New Testament is sometimes concerned with governance in so far as it affected its audience as peripheral members of society, but it does not take up questions of governance from the perspective of those who actually do governance.

Fortunately, the Christian canon is not limited to the writings of the New Testament. Christians also claim the Hebrew Scriptures—texts that very explicitly take up the question of how a people ought to govern themselves. For the people who compiled the Hebrew Scriptures, worship and governance were not separate issues. It appears, in fact, that the priesthood and ruling authorities were very closely intertwined in Ancient Israel. The language of “Thus says the Lord” that gets thrown around in Hebrew Scripture can be thought of as a convention of political dialogue. To invoke the will of God was probably not just a function of religious professionals attending to ritual tasks, but also a part of the way that political conversations happened.

The two major camps in Old Testament political thought were  the prophets and the Deuteronomists. It's never quite accurate to speak of an ancient text in terms of modern categories, but generally speaking it's fair to categorize the Deuteronomists as establishment figures whereas the prophets are  more like shrill dissidents. Deuteronomical thinking finds expression in the book of Deuteronomy, and you can look up the prophets in books like Amos and Hosea.

Economic conservatives might at first feel at home in the world of Deuteronomy, as the book  is typically thought to represent the perspective of Israel’s political elites. The most distinctive feature of Deuteronomical thinking is the notion that “God blesses the righteous and curses the wicked,” which is a nice thing to be able to claim if you are living a life of opulence in the midst of  a great deal of poverty. Deuteronomical thinking equates material well-being with morality and assumes that the playing field of life is more or less level. It takes no account of power, privilege, or luck when discussing someone’s station in life. We have all gotten our just deserts and that’s all there is to it.

Of course, anyone with a shred of self-awareness knows that none of the Deuteronomist’s assumptions about life are true. They certainly were not true in the world of ancient Israel. Archaeological evidence indicates that most Israelites’ lives were probably, to borrow from Hobbes, “nasty, brutish, and short.”

It is likely that the vast majority of Israelites were subsistence farmers who were dependent upon conditions completely outside of their control for their continued livelihood. The Hebrew Scriptures indicate that debt slavery was a problem in Israelite society, which indicates to scholars that subsistence farmers would sometimes have no choice but to sell themselves to a wealthy landholder in order to secure their continued survival in the event of a poor yield from their crops.

If the scholarly reconstructions of Israelite society are true, then the rage with which the Hebrew prophets spoke on behalf of the poor is more than understandable. The vast majority of people lived meager lives while a handful of elites enjoyed conditions of relative opulence. In prophetic thought, wealth disparities are no coincidence, and they are most definitely not divinely sanctioned. No, for the prophets, there are poor people because there are rich people.

The other major facet of prophetic thought is that God is really, really not okay with that. Biblically speaking, rich people are pretty well screwed once divine justice is instituted. Prophetic thought envisions a dramatic upheaval of the social order in which the lowly are elevated and the mighty brought low. The process is typically described with violent symbolism. The prophet Hosea says that God will meet those who do injustice “like a she-bear robbed of her cubs and tear their ribs apart.” No thank you.

Luckily for economic conservatives, the Deuteronomists propose a much less radical program for the redress of injustice. The book of Deuteronomy suggests that after every seven years all debts be canceled. Then, after every 50 years, all of the land is returned to the people. Everyone starts at square one. It’s like the assumptions of Deuteronomical thinking are finally achieved and then we can be sure that only the truly righteous are accumulating wealth. Justice is achieved without any need to bring nasty she-bears into the equation.

And that's about it. The Bible doesn't spend much time directly discussing issues of economics and governance. The New Testament isn't very useful in that regard, and our models of political economy in the Old Testament are basically limited to she-bear violent revolution and Deuteronomical redistrubutions of capital.

Christians have spilled a lot of ink writing about the proper role of Church and State, and they've come up with perspectives as diverse as socialism, anarchy, fundamentalism, and realism. The question of how Christian individuals and organizations ought to relate to state authority is a rich one. But the question of what we can directly infer from the Bible about economics and governance is a much more simple. From a biblical perspective, redistribution is inevitable. The only question is whether it will be violent or voluntary.

So should the US of A institute a Deuteronomist-inspired public policy? Probably not. We could never muster the political will, and it's probably the case that canceling all debt every seven years would have disastrous consequences in credit markets.

But we shouldn't be too hard on ourselves for failing to live up to the biblical ideal because, near as anyone can tell, ancient Israel never followed the Deuteronomical economic program either. Here's another intriguing little bit of scholarly speculation. Why would economic elites espouse policies that very clearly ran counter to their own interests? It may be the case that some of the policies outlined in Deuteronomy are little more than propaganda. We know that other rulers in the Ancient Near East made similar promises.

Would be kings liked to cast themselves as champions of the poor and promise things like debt cancellation in order to garner popular support and secure power. Once they were firmly in a position of power, they would go back on their promise and debt slavery business as usual would win the day. That's some pretty cynical political posturing, but our current election ought to be evidence that human cynicism knows few limits. And there's no reason to think that Ancient Israel was fundamentally different than any other human society.

One of the reasons I like the Bible is that it speaks to human conditions that will likely always be with us. The Bible can't tell us how to govern a society, but it can point to some common problems people face in trying to do politics together.  If we view the issue of a social safety net from a biblical perspective, we'll come away with a couple of basic insights. The first is that justice requires some sort of redistribution.

We can have disagreements about what types of programs are most likely to be effective, but you'll notice that the prophets don't spend any time blaming poor people for their situation or trying to help them through stern lectures. Whether we view social spending as an extension of the gospel or simply a requirement of a decent society is up for grabs.

What I can say for sure is that we are in absolutely no danger of social programs making the work of churches irrelevant. Finally, we should all be suspicious of political ideologies that promise justice and freedom without any follow through or results. The myth of the bootstrapping American dreamer may be just as cynical as the ancient Deuteronomical code that was never actually applied.

Photo is the property of Rasiel Suarez and is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Of all the things to which humans ascribe tremendous social and moral worth, the question of whether or not God exists is, to my way of thinking, one of the silliest. It’s silly because it doesn’t actually carry the meaning or importance that people like to think it carries.  Beyond that, it often functions as a really counterproductive way of framing things. The theism vs. atheism contest most often serves to obscure communication rather than lend clarity. It’s another needless wedge issue and here’s why:

Whose God?

An apologist is someone who spends their time arguing in favor of a certain tradition or a particular set of ideas. The aim is that, by doing apologetics, people will feel more comfortable accepting your ideas because they deem that they’re backed by some intellectual muscle. In some sense, we’re all apologists. If someone questions our viewpoints, we feel the need to reassure ourselves that we’re correct. We’ve a couple of strategies in that regard. One is to dismiss the dissenting opinion simply because it comes from a place of dissent. That’s dogmatism. Please don’t do it; there is nothing so insufferable as someone who refuses to consider the idea that maybe they don’t know everything. A less obnoxious apologetic strategy is to construct some argument that lends support to your own views while disqualifying challenges to its legitimacy.

Theists have felt a need to provide rational justification for their belief in God for as long as there have been theists. Their toolbox is filled with, amongst other things, philosophical proofs for the existence of God. All of them are flawed. Typically, a proof for the existence of God relies on assumptions that either a) guarantee the desired conclusion or b) cannot be proven. A group of Silicon Valley atheists pokes some fun at proofs of God’s existence here. For example:

COSMOLOGICAL ARGUMENT, a.k.a. FIRST CAUSE ARGUMENT (I)
(1) If I say something must have a cause, it has a cause.
(2) I say the universe must have a cause.
(3) Therefore, the universe has a cause.
(4) Therefore, God exists.

The proof (although stated sardonically) is logically sound and internally consistent, but it relies on a whole slew of other assumptions which would also need to be proven.

All of that, though, is sort of beside the point, because proofs for the existence of God don’t address the question, “Whose God?” Most apologists, for some reason, don’t seem to have thought that point through. A mouthpiece like Dinesh D’souza, for example, is not arguing for the reality of Zeus or Allah. He’s arguing, presumably, for the God of the socially and politically conservative Evangelicalism that he favors. But the arguments he invokes don’t point towards any of the particular social or ethical claims that he views as the natural outcome of the existence of his God. Even supposing that he had succeeded in something other than rhetorical fireworks when trying to prove God’s existence, the God he proved wouldn’t need to be consistent with any particular traditions understanding of God.

No God, No Morals?

The “whose God?” question is tied closely into the issue of theism and morality. The thinking goes that Theistic thinking and correct religious observance are necessary components of morality (whether public or private). United States Congressional Representative Louie Gohmert recently made that very point in what was easily one of the most tone-deaf statements I’ve ever heard from a public figure. That morality and a certain sort of theism must be tied up is another baseless assumption.

Whenever someone starts talking to me about the importance of believing in their God, I can’t help but think about a joke that Bill Cosby used to tell. “The wonderful thing about cocaine,” someone had told him, “is that it intensifies your personality.” Cosby replies, “but what if you’re an asshole?”

“The wonderful thing about my God,” someone might say, “is that He strengthens and affirms my deepest held values.” Alright, well, what if your values are wrong? Or, what if your values make people feel dehumanized? When someone tries to sell me on a God whose chief function seems to be bolstering their own nastiest, most judgmental, rudest traits, I’m like, “No, but thank you.”

And so the atheist argument here is that many conceptions of God cause people to act in ways that are immoral and harmful. Thus, it would be best to abolish religion altogether. Since religion is the root of so many of our personal and social ills, it’s eradication can only improve both people and society.

Nope.

So far as human evils like factionalism, hate, and violence are concerned, they’re barking up the wrong tree. Religious people engage in all of those things, yes, but they don’t do them because they’re religious. They do them because they’re people. Factionalism and intolerance aren’t dependent upon religious belief–a point which a certain class of atheists prove for me. The New Atheist crowd–folks like Sam Harris and Lawrence Krauss–appear practically incapable of saying anything about religion without reducing all religious observance or belief to the most barbaric, backwards fundamentalism they can imagine. In acting as adversarial mouthpieces for a certain point of view, they are in many respects very similar (at least functionally) to the Jerry Falwells of the world whom they so despise.

I learned a new word the other day. “Rantitheism.” A Rantitheist is someone who takes advantage of even the most unprompted opportunity to unleash a venomous rant against religion. If you haven’t come across someone like this, hang around the comments section of Huffpost Religion. The Rantitheists illustrate beautifully another universal human tendency. As an author, the people who respond in the most enthusiastically negative way to what you’ve written are bound to be people who failed to actually understand your point. These are people with an axe to grind, and they don’t care much whether they’re sharpening it on a grindstone or your face.

Morals, not to mention basic social graces, don’t always have very much to do with whether or not one professes belief in God.

What, then?

This has all been decidedly negative. How should we frame our discussions if not with the construct of theism vs. atheism?

I think it’s much more productive to talk about cosmology. All humans, from the most devoutly religious to the superstars of rationalism, are cosmologists. By that, I simply mean that we all hold beliefs about the way the world works. We tell stories, some better than others, about the rules and dynamics that tend to govern human interactions.

The best way I know how to talk about cosmology is in the framework of politics. Consider the fact that 48% of U.S. households don’t pay Federal Income tax. When political conservatives invoke this statistic, they’re usually at the same time invoking an entire political cosmology. It all fits into a dualistic story about moochers and producers, about the virtues of markets and the evils of socialism. We’re meant to think that these 48% of households are feckless, irresponsible, and lazy; that they’re living high off of some welfare hog while honest Americans bust their humps to support their fiscal and moral failures. None of that flows logically from a simple statistic, though. The statistic gets assimilated into a pre-existing story. It is, like everything else we encounter in the world, cosmological raw material.

Cosmologies, political or otherwise, are oftentimes inaccurate. They’re shortcuts by which we’re able to make sense of a world that would be completely incomprehensible without an overarching story into which all of the pieces tend to fit. That’s what all of us hold in common, religious or secular. We’re all using our value judgments and cosmological tropes to create some type of coherent world in our minds.

One of our fundamental human questions is, basically, “how do we respond when the world outside doesn’t match the one in our brain?” The answer doesn’t depend on religiosity. It’s a function of our ability to extend empathy. Where’s the cutoff point at which we can no longer put ourselves in someone else’s shoes? Forget about religion for a moment. Try to think about your capacity as an empathetic actor. The real world’s so much bigger and more interesting than the one we’ve been building in our brains. If we can’t realize that, then we’re doomed for bickering and violent factionalism, with or without religion.

This article has been Cross-posted at my personal blog. This photo is in the Public Domain and was accessed, via Wikimedia Commons.

The AP is reporting that the Obama administration will stop deporting youths who are DREAM Act eligible. This is unambiguously good news unless you’re upset that a key Democratic voting bloc (Latinos) might be more prone to support the President going into the 2012 election.

I’m enthusiastically supporting this policy, first of all, because it is less overtly cruel than the policy it’s replacing. Deporting teenagers and young adults whose only fault in life was being brought to America before they were able to decide for themselves is a bad scene any way you slice it. A lot of these kids are exceptionally bright and industrious. If no one was aware that they were undocumented, just about everyone would be thrilled to have them here.

Even disregarding any moral implications–(how messed up is it that “even disregarding any moral implications” seems like a reasonable thing to say during a discussion about policy?)–anyway, disregarding any moral implications, this announcement represents a shift towards a much more reasonable, economically sound immigration policy. Here are a few points to that effect, framed as Objections and Rebuttals:

Objection: Won’t amnesty incentivize more illegal immigration?

Rebuttal: Maybe. The problem with this question is that it presupposes that more immigration (legal or otherwise) would be a bad thing. As I’ll explain, it wouldn’t be.

More importantly, though, its important to realize that even if the rewards of illegal immigration are increased, the costs are in most cases still extremely high. Crossing the U.S./Mexico border isn’t like strolling through a golf course. The risks are such that, typically, someone needs to be in really dire straights to risk the crossing. Coyotes (the name for human traffickers) are notorious for extorting their customers, and there is a non-negligible chance that you might die while attempting the journey. Point being, its not as if the choice to immigrate illegally is going to be made incredibly more desirable because limited amnesty is being offered. A grueling, dangerous life-option might be, at best, a little bit less horrific.

Objection: They’re stealing our jobs!

Rebuttal: No they’re not. First, this is a flat-out silly thing to say from a macro-economic standpoint. Jobs aren’t a zero-sum game. That is, my having a job doesn’t necessarily prevent someone else from being gainfully employed. At one moment in time, of course, only one person can work any given job. But this misses a much bigger picture. When someone pays me to do something, I then have money to spend, and I can go out any buy things that I wouldn’t be able to purchase otherwise. Someone, of course, needs to work in order for my new stuff to be supplied, and in some cases that someone might be a new hire. Economic activity breeds more economic activity in what is essentially a positive feedback loop. (This, by the way, is why it’s a horrible idea to slash government spending during a recession. The economy is also governed by negative feedback loops.)

More concretely, though, low-wage immigrant workers typically fill jobs that only they are willing to fill. There are very few (if any) Americans clammering to pick tomatoes or work landscaping for poverty wages.

Objection: They’re leaching public benefits without paying into them (e.g. public schools or emergency room care).

Rebuttal: That’s true. Undocumented citizens are unable to contribute to a number of the tax bases that support public services. But the cost/benefit analysis for illegal immigration isn’t nearly that simple. Undocumented citizens pay sales and property taxes. Additionally, since they work for a pittance, a lot of the prices of things that most people buy are artificially low. Tomatoes and lettuce, for example. There is really no way of knowing whether the presence of undocumented citizens is a net positive or negative for our economy and public institutions.

My feeling is that we shouldn’t be outraged if undocumented workers are taking more than they pay into our public institutions. All that means is, essentially, that we’re subsidizing their poverty wages by providing some public services. If anyone deserves to have their labor subsidized, it is undocumented workers. As mentioned, they work for wages almost all American citizens would balk at. Also, undocumented workers are much more likely than citizens to be victims of wage theft since they have no legal recourse.

Objection: Mass amounts of new immigration will throw our economic equilibrium out of place.

Rebuttal: Good. That’s sort of the entire point of a global capitalist economic system. Resources are supposed to flow freely so that everyone can benefit from market efficiencies. We do a decent job with this as it relates to capital; it’s relatively easy to purchase stock in foreign companies or the debt of any of the world’s sovereign nations.

Not so much with labor. It’s a whole lot harder to move 1,000 American workers to Mexico than it is to move the physical infrastructure of your factory. As it turns out, some barriers to the free flow of labor can’t be removed through policy. Most people aren’t too keen to move to a different state, let alone a foreign country. And even if they did, the costs of travel are prohibitive.

In many cases, though, there are no shortage of laborers chomping at the bit to migrate. Plenty of highly skilled non-Americans, for example, would love to move here–people like doctors or engineers. An influx of doctors would be especially helpful with combating our absurd healthcare costs, which would benefit everyone.

Except, of course, doctors. Doctors’ compensation would be less. And they’d throw a fit about it. That’s called “rent-seeking behavior.” When a person or groups of people seeks to restrict a market in such a way as to guard themselves from fair competition, they are acting in their own self-interest to the detriment of the well-being of everyone in general. This sort of thing is a pretty good example of people being hypocrites. Businessmen, for example, will proclaim the absolute necessity for free-markets and competition until the very first moment they have a significant market share. Then they’ll do everything in their ability to prevent anyone from competing with them.

That’s the essence of our extremely restrictive immigration policy. It serves as a mechanism to protect special labor interests. If the people who ran the world actually valued global, free-market capitalism as much as they claim, then there’d be absolutely no reason to put any restrictions at all on immigration. Socio-economic equilibria would change. That would be the point.

***********************

President Obama’s shift in policy, then, is a move in the right direction. In addition to being considerably more humane, it’s a step towards greater economic fairness and efficiency. My only objection is that it doesn’t go nearly far enough.

Here’s to hoping for some sane policy-making in the near future. Hopeful, pessimistic hoping.

This photo from Boss Tweed is used here in accordance with its Creative Commons license.

A little bit of basic background: Snake-handling churches are mostly confined to Appalachia. The practice is rooted in Jesus' post-Resurrection pronouncement towards the end of the Gospel of Mark. Chapter 16: 17-18 reads, "And these signs will accompany those who believe: by using my name they will cast out demons; they will speak in new tongues; they will pick up snakes in their hands, and if they drink any deadly thing, it will not hurt them; they will lay their hands on the sick, and they will recover." And so, as a show of faith, some Appalachian Pentecostals handle poisonous snakes as part of their religious observance.

Most Christian groups, though, are apparently content to take Jesus' word for it; they don't feel any strong compulsion to gather poisonous snakes for liturgical use. Or, they might be aware that the passage in question is widely acknowledged to be an add-on to the original manuscript of Mark (and thereby not to be considered authoritative.) Whatever the rationale, if you are like most Americans, then snakes are not one of your preferred forms of religious media.

And to briefly point out the obvious, Wolford's death probably seems at least a little bit ironic. Beyond that, I'd venture to suggest that knee-jerk reactions to this news story are characterized by the general feeling that "aren't these Appalachians ignorant/uncultured/fanatical/etc."

But let's try to be a little bit more objective, and a lot more anthropological.

What's cool about freedom of religion is that it leads to a seemingly endless proliferation of faith perspectives such that no niche seems to go unfilled. Peter Gomes, who served as Harvard's chaplain until he died last year, was a black, Republican, gay, Baptist. (Wrap your brain around that for a moment.) When it comes to religious affiliation, if you can think of it, then someone somewhere is probably claiming it. Atheist Christians? Check. Muslim Shintoist? I'm not sure, but my gut says probably.

Point being, in the absence of coercion or forced assimilation, religious views will evolve endlessly. That's why there are over 40,000 denominations of Christianity. It's also the very reason that religions continue to exist at all. Religions that refuse to adapt in some way will, eventually, die.

Culture is like this, too. If you can think of it, somewhere there exists an enthusiast. Do you know about Bronies? These are fully grown adult males with a strong predilection for My Little Pony. It is unclear whether or not their interest is intended to be ironic, and, for the purposes of most outside observers, I don't think it matters.

Q: So what do Bronies have to do with Snake-handlers?

A: You're probably tempted to make value judgments about both groups, and, in both cases, you are wrong.

If we can bracket out the issue of the sacred for a moment, then it should be clear that religion is largely a cultural phenomenon. The anthropologist Clifford Geertz defined religion as

(1) a system of symbols

(2) which acts to establish powerful, pervasive and long-lasting moods and motivations in men

(3) by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and

(4) clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that

(5) the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic

The only valid objection to Geertz's definition that I know of is that it does not account for sacrality. In Geertz's schema, there is not much to distinguish the Marine Corps from religion.

In any case, religion has a strong cultural component regardless of whether one considers religion to be part and parcel of culture more broadly defined. We should think of differences in religious practices, then, in the same way that we might view differing cultural preferences. It takes a heavy dose of elitism and obsession with class status to claim that, for instance, opera is right whereas heavy metal is wrong. These are matters of preference. Maybe you feel that your preferences are better or more refined than others, but they are still preferences. It takes a real jerk to think less of someone because of their cultural mores. So too with religion.

As it relates to the particularities of a religion's "system of symbols," we find ourselves in the realm of personal preference. For whatever reason, certain Appalachian Pentecostals have incorporated poisonous snakes into their religious observance. Whether or not you find this congenial is of little importance w/r/t the religious experience of said practitioners. It can be said, at most, that conducting a religious service with poisonous snakes is more dangerous than most other forms of liturgical expression. Anything beyond that is condescending and culturally snobbish.

Mark Wolford, like any other type of minister, used the conventions and resources of his religious tradition to deliver a message. In that sense, he was the same as any of his counterparts. Joel Osteen promises wealth and smiles really big. William Sloane Coffin Jr. quoted poetry. E. Dewey Smith Jr. whoops.

And The Rev. Mark Wolford handled snakes.

This photo is licensed by Creative Commons and was taken by mikelehen.

Some Democrats said yes, referencing an image that appeared on former Governor Sarah Palin's website that featured cross hairs over 20 congressional districts. Representative James Clyburn (D-SC) argued that miltant political rhetoric might incite "people who may not be clicking on all cylinders" to violence.

Conservative spokespeople bemoaned the "politicization of a tragedy" and made the case that Gifford's shooter--Jared Loughner-- was mentally unstable rather than motivated by political  ideology. Unfortunately, by this time conservative bloggers had also jumped on the finger-pointing bandwagon, attempting to paint Loughner as a radical leftist, if anything.

The conversation finally subsided but the damage had been done. It is doubtful that anything fruitful came from that discussion, and everyone who tried to score political points came out looking worse than before.

Now, it seems that a similar conversation is starting.

Francis Grady, who is accused of firebombing a Planned Parenthood clinic in Wisconsin, recently appeared in court. At one point during the hearing, Grady interrupted the Judge to ask, "Do you even care at all about the 1,000 babies that died screaming?" Later, Grady told reporters, "I'm here to do good and not wrong."

Following Grady's court appearance, chatter picked up on the liberal blogosphere. Grady has been branded an "anti-abortion terrorist" and his actions are being described as the natural outcome of conservative rhetoric on abortion. Pro-life organizations ought to feel complicit in this violence, we are being told.

This time, I'm inclined to think the bloggers might be right. Here's why:

Those who wish to outlaw abortion altogether frequently compare Abortion in America to the Holocaust, and this is hardly a fringe sentiment. Eric Metaxas, former Veggietales writer and author of Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy, is as about mainstream as conservative Evangelical Christians come. A couple of months ago, Metaxas gave the keynote address at the President's National Prayer Breakfast. During his speech, Metaxas tacitly implied that abortion is a modern day equivalent of  slavery and the holocaust, and afterwards went so far as to compare the Obama administration's contraceptive mandate to Germany's pre-Holocaust policies. Again, this is not fringe stuff. Metaxas is a widely respected conservative figure.

A large plurality if not a majority of Americans, I would have to guess, are ready to join Metaxas in glorifying Bonhoeffer's involvement in the plot to assassinate Hitler. The Holocaust is, after all, often brought up as the ultimate trump card to pacifism: "Oh come on, you're telling me you wouldn't kill Hitler if you had the chance?" Plenty of people imagine that they would turn to violence in the face of the most atrocious genocide in human recollection. Violence would be perfectly acceptable if not honorable in those circumstances.

So for those who genuinely believe that American abortion is the moral equivalent of the Holocaust, why would firebombing a Planned Parenthood not be considered an appropriate course of action? Why would someone hesitate to damage a little bit of property in resistance to the most horrendous evil that can be imagined? Can we really say that Grady's alleged actions are the doings of a radical lunatic lacking any mainstream moral guidance?

Only time will tell whether or not Grady will be deemed mentally unfit to stand trial, but in this case I think that the bloggers are right. Violence against abortion providers or facilities that perform abortions is hardly a great departure from the ethos instilled by  pro-life rhetoric. Pro-life conservatives can no longer speak of abortion as a nation-wide systematic murder equivalent to the Holocaust without being considered at least somewhat complicit in the violence committed against abortion providers and their facilities.

You may be aware of today’s New Testament reading if you live in America and have a pulse.  Most notably, John 3:16—“ For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”  It’s everywhere.  I’ve seen it displayed boldly on billboards or discretely on the bottom of shopping bags.  Football players wear it on their face, and their fans write the reference in big block letters on poster board.  John 3:16 is on bumper stickers, t-shirts, coffee mugs, check books, tote bags, wall clocks, and just about anything else that could conceivably bear the message.

So it’s important, apparently.

If you were to ask someone who paid to put John 3:16 on a billboard why they felt the need to spend about $12,000 a year on such a thing, they would probably say something along these lines:  “John 3:16 summarizes the entirety of Christian doctrine and teaching in one verse.  It is the most important thing a person could ever read because it has the power to save them from eternal hellfire. Twelve grand a year is a miniscule pittance to pay for even one salvation.”

The thinking is that if you see the verse, maybe then you’ll say a prayer. Later (when you die) you’ll go to heaven.  The details of what happens here and now are more secondary.

They see John 3:16, in other words, as Christianity 101—the nuts and bolts.  The essentials.

If you ask me, though, I’d have to say that John 3:16 means a lot more than that, and we’re especially mindful of the fullness and complexity of our faith at this time of year. During Lent, we retrace the life and ministry of Jesus in the hope that our own lives might take a similar shape.  We’re called to new life and commitment as Jesus is baptized, and we struggle to figure out what exactly it means to follow him. We discover that the stakes are high as Jesus rebukes Peter, saying “get behind me, Satan!”

Jesus takes us to Jerusalem and demands that we, too, reject the warhorse and ride into town on a colt, proceeding on behalf of the powerless even if it means suffering and defeat.  At the cross, we see God’s love rejected as the world makes the innocent and vulnerable bear the brunt of its brokenness.

Then, after all of that, Easter. We celebrate the promise and imminent reality of new life even in the midst of death, darkness, and estrangement.  On Easter, we Christians are keenly aware that “in our darkness a light shines, and that light is God.” (Aaron Weiss)

All of that other stuff—the Lent and Easter stuff—is a big part of what I understand John 3:16 to mean.  To believe in God’s embodied presence on earth means to embody that presence yourself.  It means following love’s imperatives even when it is difficult, and it will be difficult. So anyone in search of a feel-good, stable religious life ought to find a different faith, because Christians don’t turn a blind eye to personal hardships or social ills.  The sting of death is always part of the story, but death is not our protagonist.

Earlier, we read one of the many complaint stories that made their way into the Hebrew Scriptures.  The Israelites, who have previously directed their frustrations at Moses, are now blaming both Moses and God for their plight in the wilderness.  “Why have you brought us out of Egypt to die in the wilderness?  For there is no food and no water, and we detest this miserable food.”

At this point they’re so disgruntled that they’re incapable of forming a coherent complaint.  Is there no food or is the food miserable?  Doesn’t matter—things are bad and they’re angry. And, as is often the case, things need to get worse before they finally stop their grumbling and ask for help.  So now there are snakes.  The Israelites are eating their miserable, non-existent food and they’re dying from snake poison.  Finally they show some agency in the form of repentance: “We have sinned by speaking against the Lord and against you; pray to the Lord to take away the serpents from us.”

Moses fashions a bronze serpent, lifts it up upon a pole, and any poison-afflicted Israelites would look at the serpent of bronze and live.

Fast forward to the first century and Jesus is saying to Nicodemus, “I’m like that bronze serpent.”

I understand this to mean that the love made manifest in the whole person, life, and ministry of Christ, when embodied, brings life triumphant to those who would otherwise suffer darkness, estrangement, and loss of identity.  When we love, we live, and that’s how we know God.  It was the second century church father St. Irenaeus who wrote that “The Glory of God is a human being fully alive.”

And the Glory of God is not veiled behind clouds or walled off by pearly gates.  It is in our midst.

John’s theology employs what theologians call a “realized eschatology.” That’s really just a fancy way of saying that the experience of salvation is readily available here and now. The Realm of God is in, around, and among the faithful.  We get a little taste of John’s realized eschatology in today’s reading: “Those who believe in him are not condemned, but those who do not believe are condemned already.”

This really ought to be starkly contrasted with the way in which salvation, heaven, and eternity are normally discussed within the context of John 3:16.

One popular application of John 3:16 goes like this: If you say a prayer acknowledging your belief in Jesus, then you can be certain that eternity in heaven will be yours after death.  This blessed assurance oftentimes comes packaged with the convenient fringe benefit of being able to tell others that they will certainly be spending some time in Hell.  The need for justification is far too often paired with the urge to wield judgment.  Wendell Berry has written that, for many people, “the highest Christian bliss would be to get to heaven and find that you were the only one there.”

As popular as that view may be, it isn’t John’s perspective.  John believes that by choosing darkness, we impose judgment on ourselves.  So if you’re trying to view the world from John’s theological perspective, then leave your wrathful God at home.  As the author of 1^st John puts it, “God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.”

My undergraduate mentor has for many years taught a course called Meanings of Death. As part of the class, he sometimes asks his students to draw heaven, and while there is usually plenty of variety, there are also recurring themes.  Heaven tends to look a lot like a stereotypical suburban neighborhood—much more pristine, to be sure, but at the same time equally bland. And anyone can tell you about the ways in which inhabitants of heaven spend their time—they pray, sing hymns, and play their God-issued harps on a luminous cloud.

This image of perfectly blissful living is odd.  A lot of people flock to suburban neighborhoods, but they do so for comfort and safety, not for maximum enjoyment.  And many of us like to sing hymns on Sunday and to pray when the mood strikes but there’s a reason that most Christians don’t live in monasteries.  The thought of doing that stuff all of the time simply isn’t appealing.  If our vision of heaven was made real in the form of a summer camp or amusement park, then I'd imagine that their business would be less than brisk.

Mark Twain wrote that

Man’s heaven is a curious place. It consists wholly of diversions which on earth he cares for not at all….Man’s heaven is a place of reward—made it himself, mind you—all out of his own head.  Very well; of the delights of this world man cares most for sexual intercourse. He will go any length for it—risk fortune, character, reputation, life itself. And what do you think he has done? In a thousand years you would never guess—he has left it out of his heaven! Prayer takes its place.

So there’s our picture of heaven.  In eternity, we live in the sort of houses that few people would consider dream homes and we spend all of our time on tiresome acts of piety.  The Glory of God is not, as St. Irenaeus suggested, a human being fully alive, but an ever-so-pious, sexless, middle-class suburbanite.

I’ve got to think that this all says more about our own expectations and guilt than it does about God’s glory or any true experience of salvation.  Typically, we follow the myth of the American dream much more closely than the pattern of life exemplified by Jesus.  We attach our sense of value to a salary, or to a spouse, or to a white picket fence, perfect lawn and 1.9 beautiful children.  And when we do enjoy something—truly enjoy something—we find a way to feel at least a little bit guilty about it.  That’s the mark of guilt-ridden people—“not to feel too badly about themselves they make sure they don’t feel too good about anything.” (William Sloane Coffin)

Untold masses of people worship at the altar of self-preservation and then have the gall to wonder why it is they aren’t experiencing any vibrancy, dynamism, or fulfillment in their lives. They have everything they wanted and yet they’re more miserable than ever. The American situation is, as comedian Louis C.K. put it, that “everything is awesome and no one is happy.”

And what a shame—to be offered fullness and vibrancy of life but to settle for a sterilized blandness bordering on death.  The reality of eternity must be better than our popular notions.

Let’s finish, then, by revitalizing that notion of eternity a little bit. Normally we think of eternity as being associated with an unthinkably long period of time, but eternity is really a place where time fades away altogether.  Past and future are irrelevant if not nonsensical concepts in eternity.  That sounds, to me, an awful lot like a moment of genuine presentness.

We know eternity in all of those little moments when we feel that we could die happily; when guilt from our past fades away and we don’t recognize any future anxiety whatsoever.  Eternity feels like loved ones united after a long absence, lost in the joy of one another’s company.  Eternity is a little bit like two lovers meeting at an airport’s arrivals terminal.

When we abide in love we abide in God, and it is there that we know eternity and our souls find rest.  In eternity, we can cast off any feelings of guilt and anxiety and get down to the exciting business of reconciling the world through love.  Along the way, we find out what it means to live fully into our humanity.  We’re broken and blessed, sorrowful and triumphant. Death is present but our most immediate and vivid reality is life.  We ask with Paul, “Where, O Death, is your victory? Where, O Death, is your sting?”

And if there is any response, we’re too busy living to hear it.  Amen.

Pundit Erick Erickson responded with an article titled "The Perversion of the Words of Our Lord Jesus Christ by the Sinner Barack H. Obama."  It is, as you probably picked up from the title, maybe just a little bit self-righteous.

Do I have an even more ridiculous example to share with you?  Thanks for asking.  Fox contributor Steven Crowder appeared on Fox and Friends Sunday to tell us that President Obama "should go back to burning the tax-payer funded incense to whatever pagan, foreign deity he's worshiping."  Crowder also says some stuff about tithing, "rendering unto Caesar," and abortion.  As you may have picked up from watching even just a few seconds of his rant, Crowder's rhetorical strategy is to smugly attack extraordinarily flammable straw-men.  It was also, maybe, just a little bit self-righteous.

I don't have time for a point by point refutation of all the arguments that Erickson and Crowder managed to produce.  That would be a pretty lengthy process, and occasionally I like to actually attend to my more formal responsibilities as a seminarian.

A few things should be said, though, as it relates to the line of theological reasoning that the likes of Erickson and Crowder tend to employ.  Although their accusations are a little bit extreme, their core beliefs and basic methodology are shared by many of those who find the President's religious understanding problematic.

I'll be upfront in saying that I'm arguing against a generalization.  If you find my generalization to be extremely inaccurate or not at all useful please let me know, as I don't mean to present a point of view simply for the convenience of my own argument.

That being said, I think it's fairly noncontroversial to point out that there is a brand of American Christianity that views its theological beliefs as being inextricably tied into conservative economic and social policies.  The preferred social philosophers of those who share this particular religious understanding are the likes of Ayn Rand, Friedrich Hayek, and Milton Friedman, and they view laissez faire capitalism as being not only socially desirable but morally necessary (some would even say it's God-ordained).  Socially, they tend to harp on the usual conservative laundry list of demands--outlawing abortion, protecting the "sanctity of marriage," keeping sex-ed within the realms of abstinence-only programs, and requiring public school teachers to present creationism along side of the science of evolution.

Probably Erickson and Crowder fall in this camp, along with many other American Christians.  I disagree with most of their positions, but it's not really my aim to take them to task over their political philosophy or preferred set of social mores.  Let me focus instead on what appears to be their method of scriptural interpretation and theological argumentation.

Even a cursory glance at the history of religion and society reveals that the Bible can be used to defend just about anything at all.  And far too often, we must admit, religious sentiment has been paired with violence and various fashionable prejudices.  Blaise Pascal wrote that "men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction."  He was right.

My point isn't that religious conservatives are a uniform bunch of blood-thirsty bigots.  I simply wish to point out that God sometimes stands on the far-side of history.  In the past, people associated their deeply-felt religious convictions with social attitudes and institutions that are now almost universally considered to be wrong.  This ought to dissuade us from clinging to the notion that our current understanding of Christianity has been plucked out of the mind of God.

But that's typically not the case with those who make arguments similar to those of Erickson and Crowder.  The Bible, in their view, is the infallible Word of God, and only their interpretation is correct.  Any alternate or dissenting opinions on the nature of Christian faith are the pagan ramblings of sinners.

Let me point out briefly that there are 40,000 denominations of Christianity in the world.  (No, that's not a typo.)  That one strand of Christian thinking would be perfectly correct and all the others wrong is, at the very least, statistically unlikely.

A more plausible explanation of what's going on with all of the different sects of Christianity, I think, is that an incredible number of factors contribute to one person or group's religious understanding.  I would think that if the Bible were an unambiguously straight-forward document, then there would not be such a proliferation of theological views in the world.

Put another way, the Bible is not like a legal contract, which is meant to be read in one way only, and it is certainly not like a set of scientific data or a mathematical equation.  Like everything else that humans have made--historical accounts, paintings, novels, music--it is open to interpretation.  And the way in which one interprets the Bible depends largely upon the sort assumptions they make before reading it.

As such, someone prone to holding conservative social, political, or economic views will likely read those views into their religious understanding.  They are not wrong; they are interpreting.  There is, remember, no view from nowhere.

It seems to me that most liberally-minded, mainline Protestants are willing to concede this point, at least on some level.  The problem, as I see it, with conservative interpreters is that they are not willing to admit that they are bringing a particular set of assumptions and methodologies to the text.  Their preferred method of religious formulation is "God says such-and-such," which is merely a heightened, more dogmatic form of "because I said so."  The result is that their set of religious views cannot be questioned because they are, as a matter of definition, unfalsifiable.

Those sorts of attitudes clearly present a stumbling block to rational discourse, but they are also, in my view, theologically problematic.  For Christians, God is supposed to be the final source of moral meaning.  To make an overly rigid judgment, especially on matters of social policy or politics, is essentially to claim that role for yourself.  One of my classmates, Gretch Steubbel, put it better than I can: "I am always so humbled by those self-made hermeneutical giants who have chosen themselves to interpret scripture.... [It is] so much responsibility for a mere mortal to take upon himself the mind and judgment of God."  Indeed.

Or, if you prefer, we can get a bit more scriptural.  Do you remember the story of Moses and the burning bush?  It is at this point that the proper name of the Biblical God is said to have been revealed.  Moses has been told that he is speaking to "the LORD, the God of your fathers—the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob," but he presses on in saying,  "Suppose I go to the Israelites and say to them, 'The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ Then what shall I tell them?”

Moses wasn't just pressing for clarification.  In the ancient world, if someone knew the name of a god, then they could wield that god's power according to their own interests.  This makes God's response pretty cool.  The name that God gives to Moses--YHWH--can't be translated precisely and no one is totally sure how it was supposed to be pronounced.  It means something along the lines of "I am that I am" or "I will be who I will be."  God is telling Moses that the power and purposes of God are not the property of mortals.  God will be who God will be.

God is not, then, a Republican or a Democrat.  God is not a capitalist or a socialist.  God does not give exclusive sanction to one set of social mores or any particular system of social organization.

God will be who God will be.

At a campaign stop on Monday, Rick Santorum fielded a question from a woman who claimed that Barack Obama is "an avowed Muslim."  She added also that "he has no legal right to be president."  (Yes, birtherism is still alive and well; it may end up being one of America's most delusional and longest lasting conspiracy theories.)

Um, what?

President Obama has professed his Christian faith on several occasions and his longtime affiliation with Trinity United Church of Christ was unfairly smeared ad nauseum by the conservative press during the 2008 election.

Now, this isn't the first time that a UCCer has been accused of not really being a Christian, but the charge of "Unitarian Considering Christ" is much more common than "avowed Muslim."  And, depending on your perspective, maybe "Unitarian Considering Christ" seems a legitimate critique of certain Congregationalists.  My feeling, though, is that if they really warrant such a title, then they probably won't find it all too offensive.

For the record, the United Church of Christ was formed in 1957 when churches from the Congregationalist, Reformed, and Evangelical traditions banded together.  The polity of the UCC is such that the local congregation holds authority over things like the style of worship, social commitments, and theological convictions.  As such, the United Church of Christ is exceptionally diverse.  And, yes, some congregations strike Christians of the more conservative variety as being "not actually Christian."

If people want to squabble over which Protestants are properly Orthodox, then it's not really any skin off of my back.  Personally I find the whole premise a little bit silly, considering that Protestant denominations wouldn't exist at all without the Catholic Church having kept the Christian tradition alive for so long.  But, if you'd like to squabble about what Orthodoxy consists in, that's fine.  Just don't expect me to join you.

But "avowed Muslim?"  First of all, I'm generally of the opinion that the world needs more people of good faith rather than more people of a particular faith, to paraphrase Political Scientist Drew Westen.  So I don't see "avowed Muslim" as a pejorative.  But secondly and more importantly, what?  What sort of reality does one have to inhabit in order to think something like that?  I would imagine that even a person who had been exposed to no media at all besides Rush Limbaugh since birth would know better.

Rick Santorum's response was even more perturbing.  At the time, he addressed neither of the woman's claims.  Later that day, he told the moderators of a GOP debate:

Why do you guys ask these ‘gotcha’ questions, like it’s my job to go out and correct everybody who says something I don’t agree with? ... I don’t think it’s my responsibility. Why don’t you go out and correct her? It’s not my responsibility as a candidate to go out and correct everybody who makes a statement that I disagree with.

Okay, maybe it's not your responsibility to act as American political discourse's fact police all the time.  It is your responsibility as someone who deems himself to be fit for our highest public office to show some spine occasionally in the face of unambiguously toxic, untrue accusations.  That wasn't just a statement that you disagree with like an endorsement of a cap-and-trade policy.  It was, by any measure of reality, demonstrably false and representative of America's most reactionary, fearful impulses.

These are the sorts of statements that should make any remotely reasonable American cringe, not matters of debatable ideology.  Courting the reactionary vote by leaving whatever prejudices happen to be fashionable unchecked may be good politics, but it is absolutely horrible citizenship.  Making sure that our public discourse is guided by adherence to some measure of reality and basic facts is everyone's responsibility, and the failure to do so will not end well.

Image courtesy of the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons