Wednesday September 23, 2009
Beyond obedience
By Jim Taylor
“What’s this ‘emerging church’ we keep hearing about?” two acquaintances challenged me earlier this summer.
“Emerging paradigm,” I corrected them. “It’s not a new church – it’s mostly the freedom not to believe some things that no longer make sense.”
I offered examples — that God created the universe in its present form in seven 24-hour days; that half of Jesus’ DNA came from a being who doesn’t have human DNA; that Jesus levitated into the sky…
“But that means,” one of them interrupted, “that you don’t believe the Bible is the Word of God!”
“I believe the Bible contains the word of God,” I replied. “But by its own account, it also contains the words of the devil.”
The conversation quickly veered off into safer topics.
Words of the devil
But I kept thinking about that conversation.
Matthew, Mark, and Luke all quote words purportedly said by Satan, tempting Jesus. The book of Job quotes Satan, bargaining with God.
Do those words carry the same authority as the words attributed to God, simply because they are in the Bible?
I’ve read, occasionally, about satanic worship cults. Their rituals sounded like parodies of a High Mass or Eucharist.
A friend who died not long ago believed that she had been a victim of a satanic cult in her youth. I wondered what they used as their sacred text.
“The Bible, of course,” she replied.
I was surprised.
“Well,” she explained, “if you wanted to hide something, where it couldn’t be removed or changed, what could be a better place than in a book that Christians consider too holy to question?”
That actually makes sense. If I wanted to destroy a divine power, I certainly wouldn’t advertise my intentions openly. That would be as self-defeating as walking into airport security with a placard that says, “I am a terrorist suicide bomber.”
The domino effect
But once you acknowledge that some parts of the Bible may not be as authoritative as others, doesn’t every other part become suspect? It’s called the “domino effect” – a chain reaction where one falling domino causes all the rest to topple.
Of course. But it raises the possibility that God expects more from us than just obedience. Maybe God expects us to think, too.
I actually do believe that some writings preserved in the Bible misunderstood God’s intentions. Because they came from a ruthless culture, they assumed that God wanted them to commit genocide. They took for granted that God would seek revenge. They assumed that God belonged only to them.
But that’s not a problem, if I see the Bible as a progressive unfolding of God’s desires. So it moves from massive retaliation, to limited retaliation –an eye for an eye, but not more – to forgiving one’s enemies, to loving one’s enemies. It goes from endorsing slavery, to recognizing slaves’ rights, to rejecting distinctions between slave and free.
If I had my way, I’d want Bibles sold without back covers – to remind us that our gradually growing understanding of God’s intentions did not end 19 centuries ago.
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Copyright © 2009 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
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Your Turn
You seem to have liked last week’s column about new vistas opening up. There were two letters, in addition to the ones I’ve quoted below, expressing appreciation.
Chris Blackburn added, “I always liked that poem by Keats — the men looking at a new ocean (of possibilities) but I tend to wear blinkers myself.”
Wesley White thought enough of the column to set up a link to it from his own blog site, http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2009/09/psalm-1.html if you want to follow it up. I’m grateful for any links you post on your own sites, because those boost my findability on Google.
Steve Roney questioned my choices of “explorers of the mind, of the unknown.”
He wrote, “You do a serious disservice, I think, by lumping Freud in with a group of scientists (and, granted, one philosopher). … Freud’s views… have been disproven in detail. Martin Gardiner included Freud in his book ‘Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science’ way back in the 1950s; nothing has changed since then. Freudianism is kept alive for political reasons, nothing more. Too many careers, academic and psychiatric, indeed too many institutions, depend on maintaining the fiction.
“His concept of the unconscious, for example, is incoherent. It would mean that, when we are daydreaming, or reading a book, or praying, we are "unconscious." You have to dump the idea of an "unconscious mind" in order to make sense of the human soul.”
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About My Paraphrases
Occasionally, I get frustrated by the Bible. Not usually by the message, which is timeless, but by the language and metaphor. Contemporary translations update the language, but not the metaphor, so the text still expects us to respond to images of deserts and tents, camels and droughts, kings and concubines. What we’ve learned since the Bible was written — about psychology and evolution, about quantum physics and astronomy, computers and fossil fuels – is simply left out.
At such times, I start paraphrasing. I don’t pretend that these paraphrases rely on new translations of original texts. They are, rather, my way of writing what I think the original writers might have said IF they lived today. Sometimes I stick close to the traditional versification; sometimes I take liberties.
My paraphrase of Paul’s letter to the Romans attempts to put Paul’s sometimes convoluted words — and argument — into a contemporary setting. If Paul were writing today, to the Christian church, I’m not sure he’d worry as much about the failure of the Jews to follow Christ as about the failure of Christians to follow Christ, so I have rephrased in those terms. I suspect he would also make use of quotations from the Gospels — which of course didn’t exist when he wrote his letters — rather than using quotations from the only scriptures he had available, which we call the Old Testament.
About 200 people have requested the paraphrase of Romans, as an electronic file.
I now have two new paraphrases available, for Ecclesiastes and Job. Ecclesiastes sticks pretty much to the biblical flow of verses – though with, I hope, some sense of humour. Job cuts 42 chapters down to about three pages. I found the speeches in Job interminable; the only way I could make sense of the various characters’ verbal meanderings was to turn them into television sound-bites.
I’m making these available the same way as Romans – on the honor system. You send me an e-mail and request the file you want. I’ll send it. If you like it, and want to keep it, you send me a cheque for $5 by snail mail. If you don’t like it, simply erase it from your hard disk and send nothing.
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TECHNICAL STUFF
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PROMOTION STUFF…
If you know someone else who might like to receive this column regularly via e-mail, send a request to [email protected]. Or, if you wish, forward them a copy of this column. But please put your name on it, so they don’t think I’m sending out spam.
For a lighter look at life, faith, and the lectionary, I recommend my friend Ralph Milton’s weekly e-newsletter Rumors. You can subscribe to it by sending a note to [email protected].
For other web links worth pursuing, try
- Charlene Fairchild’s United Online site,
- David Keating’s “SeemslikeGod” page
- The Canadian Centre for Progressive Christianity home page
- Dan Strizek’s Gathering Place for Creation Spirituality
- Alva Wood’s satiric stories about small town attitudes and bumbling bureaucrats are not particularly religious, but good fun anyway; write [email protected] to get onto her mailing list.
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