Devadatta
Well-Known Member
The new atheists have often pointed out that liberal Christians tend to cherry pick from the bible, choosing only what fits comfortably with what they already believe, whereas fundamentalists and literalists appear to at least stand by the text.
To me the irony – unless I’m totally off base – is that Christianity has always operated roughly on these two tracks: what one might call the “ideological” and the “open”.
Ideological Christianity by definition has nearly always had the upper hand – it’s what its creeds, dogmas and hierarchies are there for. Open Christianity, on the other hand, is the love that in a sense dare not speak its name. You know it only when you see it: when Jesus takes a child on his knee, certain gestures by St. Francis, etc. Almost invariably such expressions must be framed within the ruling ideology; thus, even many so-called liberal churches still claim to adhere to the old creeds, even while they cherry pick through the bible and preach the social gospel.
For the liberal/open pulse of Christianity to win out over its ideological brother – and I hope it does - it can’t just pick out the good bits; it needs to be more bold and more definitive about the way it reads scripture. And I don’t mean yet more sophisticated theology. There’s plenty of that. Sure, God is a verb, not a noun, but that won’t win the game against the literalists.
I think liberal Christianity needs to develop and propagate basic rules-of-thumb on how to read the New Testament in particular, not cherry picking, but pointing out what parts of the text to privilege over the rest, following clear principles. Of course, I’m hardly qualified to set these principles out with any precision. But I think there are some basics that most people will find self-evident.
But first there’s a serious barrier to deal with: that the New Testament as a whole was shaped and edited by orthodoxy, that is, fundamentally by the ideological pulses of the tradition.
So the game is in a sense already rigged. That means that from the get-go it’s impossible to simply pull the collection of books apart neatly and label them with this tendency or that. One book – if you pardon the expression – bleeds into another. The divisions are not absolute.
Complicating the problem is what underlies this shaping ideology: the idea of the apocalypse, and with that the whole machinery of the end of days, bodily resurrection, the last judgment, etc. We know that this storyline motivated early Christians, along with many other Jewish sects. Without it, many Christians wouldn’t recognize their faith, the most recent evidence being the popularity of the dreadful left behind series. It would be like a Hollywood thriller without the sex and violence.
Unfortunately, the apocalyptic impulse, however fascinating as a phenomenon, represents some of the worst aspects of ideological Christianity. Much “bad faith” in every sense of the phrase is concealed and not-so-concealed in its flights of hope and fancy: the all-too-human craving for escape, rewards, revenge, the humiliation of our enemies. What I’m expressing here of course is a “liberal” point of view, but I think this needs to be the first principle, the first line in the sand of a truly robust liberal Christianity: apocalyptic thought possibly had survival value for Jewish and Christian circles of those days. But millennia later it’s a dangerous distraction from the more (fundamental!) heart of the Christian message.
So that’s the barrier to a liberal/open reading of the New Testament. Nevertheless, the New Testament, however shaped by ideology, remains a repository of multiple tendencies, multiple traditions based on the life and death of Jesus. Without going into minute deconstructions – there is and will be no end to that; some find a different Jesus in every book, a different Jesus for every reader – I think that most common readers, once they read the individual books as distinct wholes (getting away from the always inconclusive battle of the verses) will see three main tendencies: that of the synoptics, the Gospel of John, and the letters of St. Paul.
Again, I think most would agree that in the synoptics we get the fundamental message of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection, and that in the Gospel of John and the letters of St. Paul we get theological/metaphysical elaborations. The question is the order of priority.
I think it’s clear that ideological Christianity, its creeds and structure of authority most privilege Paul’s theological cosmic drama of original sin and final redemption, and John’s theology of the incarnate logos/word. Liberal Christianity, and the social gospel, on the other hand, are clearly more rooted in the synoptics.
But what is the fundamental message of the synoptics? Again, the commonsense reading is that first of all it signals the spiritual, inward turn you find not only in Christianity but in other Jewish sects and in the Hellenistic philosophies of the time. Jesus is the messiah who brings on the kingdom and the fulfillment of the law, but it’s a spiritualized kingdom and a law transformed through love. Through parables and other teaching he exemplified this idea of the kingdom and the transformed law. Through the sacrifice of his life and resurrection (whether literal or metaphorical) he earns his authority as teacher, shows what a spiritual life looks like and demonstrates victory over death.
It seems not just to me but to many people that in general the Jesus of the synoptics doesn’t force you to decide on his ultimate metaphysical status, maintain that all other religions are wrong, or that you must believe x, y and z propositions to avoid hideous eternal torment. Certainly some of those elements can be found there, but surely the emphasis in the synoptics is not belief but action, not dogma but praxis: love, tend to the poor, serve others. Do these things and the metaphysics takes care of itself, is a fair summary, it seems to me.
To me the irony – unless I’m totally off base – is that Christianity has always operated roughly on these two tracks: what one might call the “ideological” and the “open”.
Ideological Christianity by definition has nearly always had the upper hand – it’s what its creeds, dogmas and hierarchies are there for. Open Christianity, on the other hand, is the love that in a sense dare not speak its name. You know it only when you see it: when Jesus takes a child on his knee, certain gestures by St. Francis, etc. Almost invariably such expressions must be framed within the ruling ideology; thus, even many so-called liberal churches still claim to adhere to the old creeds, even while they cherry pick through the bible and preach the social gospel.
For the liberal/open pulse of Christianity to win out over its ideological brother – and I hope it does - it can’t just pick out the good bits; it needs to be more bold and more definitive about the way it reads scripture. And I don’t mean yet more sophisticated theology. There’s plenty of that. Sure, God is a verb, not a noun, but that won’t win the game against the literalists.
I think liberal Christianity needs to develop and propagate basic rules-of-thumb on how to read the New Testament in particular, not cherry picking, but pointing out what parts of the text to privilege over the rest, following clear principles. Of course, I’m hardly qualified to set these principles out with any precision. But I think there are some basics that most people will find self-evident.
But first there’s a serious barrier to deal with: that the New Testament as a whole was shaped and edited by orthodoxy, that is, fundamentally by the ideological pulses of the tradition.
So the game is in a sense already rigged. That means that from the get-go it’s impossible to simply pull the collection of books apart neatly and label them with this tendency or that. One book – if you pardon the expression – bleeds into another. The divisions are not absolute.
Complicating the problem is what underlies this shaping ideology: the idea of the apocalypse, and with that the whole machinery of the end of days, bodily resurrection, the last judgment, etc. We know that this storyline motivated early Christians, along with many other Jewish sects. Without it, many Christians wouldn’t recognize their faith, the most recent evidence being the popularity of the dreadful left behind series. It would be like a Hollywood thriller without the sex and violence.
Unfortunately, the apocalyptic impulse, however fascinating as a phenomenon, represents some of the worst aspects of ideological Christianity. Much “bad faith” in every sense of the phrase is concealed and not-so-concealed in its flights of hope and fancy: the all-too-human craving for escape, rewards, revenge, the humiliation of our enemies. What I’m expressing here of course is a “liberal” point of view, but I think this needs to be the first principle, the first line in the sand of a truly robust liberal Christianity: apocalyptic thought possibly had survival value for Jewish and Christian circles of those days. But millennia later it’s a dangerous distraction from the more (fundamental!) heart of the Christian message.
So that’s the barrier to a liberal/open reading of the New Testament. Nevertheless, the New Testament, however shaped by ideology, remains a repository of multiple tendencies, multiple traditions based on the life and death of Jesus. Without going into minute deconstructions – there is and will be no end to that; some find a different Jesus in every book, a different Jesus for every reader – I think that most common readers, once they read the individual books as distinct wholes (getting away from the always inconclusive battle of the verses) will see three main tendencies: that of the synoptics, the Gospel of John, and the letters of St. Paul.
Again, I think most would agree that in the synoptics we get the fundamental message of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection, and that in the Gospel of John and the letters of St. Paul we get theological/metaphysical elaborations. The question is the order of priority.
I think it’s clear that ideological Christianity, its creeds and structure of authority most privilege Paul’s theological cosmic drama of original sin and final redemption, and John’s theology of the incarnate logos/word. Liberal Christianity, and the social gospel, on the other hand, are clearly more rooted in the synoptics.
But what is the fundamental message of the synoptics? Again, the commonsense reading is that first of all it signals the spiritual, inward turn you find not only in Christianity but in other Jewish sects and in the Hellenistic philosophies of the time. Jesus is the messiah who brings on the kingdom and the fulfillment of the law, but it’s a spiritualized kingdom and a law transformed through love. Through parables and other teaching he exemplified this idea of the kingdom and the transformed law. Through the sacrifice of his life and resurrection (whether literal or metaphorical) he earns his authority as teacher, shows what a spiritual life looks like and demonstrates victory over death.
It seems not just to me but to many people that in general the Jesus of the synoptics doesn’t force you to decide on his ultimate metaphysical status, maintain that all other religions are wrong, or that you must believe x, y and z propositions to avoid hideous eternal torment. Certainly some of those elements can be found there, but surely the emphasis in the synoptics is not belief but action, not dogma but praxis: love, tend to the poor, serve others. Do these things and the metaphysics takes care of itself, is a fair summary, it seems to me.
