How It's Done

Alright, these blogs are getting a little time consuming, requiring reading and stuff. This one will be off the cuff, no looking stuff up, more in the spirit of the Internet. That doesn’t mean I’m just making it up, but I will draw a little on personal experience.

A couple major players in the world of atheists helped me understand how theology works. One of them is Bart Ehrmann, who started out as a fundamentalist from the American South. Of fundamentalism, he now says, it is not much fun, too much damn and very little mental. When he went to seminary school, he went in knowing that there would be liberal professors that would try to teach him that the Bible was written by men and that it was not the inerrant word of God.

He was right, but it wasn’t until he got there that he found out how it’s done. Another great scholar, Daniel Dennett has also explained this from a different perspective. He never saw the Bible as anything but a collection of documents from history and says that the seminary schools are no longer able to find professors for Biblical history that are willing to lie. These professors do want to keep their jobs and to do so, they need to attract fundamentalist students and probably know better than to discuss the theological implications of Bible history in too much depth.

How is it done? Mainly by example. Because the questions have become incessant on the Internet, there are some examples of direct answers, addressing passages like the one about being happy to see babies’ heads smashed on the rocks, but that is not how it is usually done. More difficult to find would be one addressing the 3,000 people that God ordered Moses to kill because they broke the brand new covenant. The chief tool used to address these problems on Sunday, is not to address them at all. Sunday worship involves a few minutes of reading, carefully selected and approved at the highest levels. Stick to that and your battle is half over.

That doesn’t always work. The second time I agreed to give a sermon, I said in advance that I would commit to preaching from the lectionary. My luck, what comes up but the story of Abraham listening to God and almost sacrificing, i.e. killing, his own son, his only son, born at a late age for Abraham and his wife. I even made that part of the sermon; that this was a difficult passage to reconcile with the modern world. Pastors say that pretty often actually. In this case I danced around it and said something about commitment.

Later I realized I could have talked about mythology; that the story was written in a time when human sacrifice was common. This story says, your God is in charge, you must obey, but he isn’t going to ask for human sacrifice anymore. That wouldn’t really be a Christian sermon though, more of an academic lecture. Or I could have done what Penn Gillette does and challenge them to ask themselves, if your god asks you to kill your own son, would you refuse? If you answer yes, then you’re an atheist. But I was never into doing that.

Usually, it’s not as hard as human sacrifice. Most of the child murders and rapes are not in the lectionary, but everyone knows the Abraham story, so I guess they have to include it. Usually, the commonly known part of the story is easily separated from the killing parts. You may have heard of the “still soft voice” of God that Elijah hears in the wilderness. It’s a great little piece of poetry with lots of storms and wind and then a whisper, where he hears God. But what does God say? You won’t hear that in a sermon. God tells Elijah who to anoint for kings and prophets and who they are going to slay.

We do this with non-religious stories by the way. Think about the story of Helen Keller, a little girl who can’t hear or speak. She learns how to communicate then goes on to be a great speaker. But what does she speak about? I always assumed she talked about disabilities or just told her own story. Nope. She was a Socialist. She spoke about worker’s rights. Bet your teacher didn’t tell you that one.

Professors and pastors don’t come out and explain this like I am. So we learn by example. Pastors give us great cherry picked quotes. We look them up and see what immediately precedes or follows them. We learn not to mention those difficult parts. We learn not to talk about politics in polite company. We learn God is love and that’s all you need to know. 

Occupy Ancient Palestine

I’m going to take another from the book “Parables as Subversive Speech”, but this one won’t be as painful as the one from a few weeks ago. It was not the analysis of the parable that was as interesting as the sociology he drew on to do the analyzing. You can google “moral entrepreneurs” and find out more about that, or just read my summary here. The parable is from Luke 18:9-14, about the toll collector. It is commonly used to contrast piety and humility and sometimes to discuss how to pray. But this book never goes with the common interpretation.

Before beginning the discussion of what he thinks the parable is about, Herzog (the author) gives his historical analysis, explaining what a toll collector was and why he thinks it is a toll collector and not a tax collector and why that is significant and what a bunch of other people have thought about it, then concludes that the parable was a riddle, even to the people who first heard it. To understand the riddle, he describes the “agonistic” society of the time. Not “agnostic”, “agonistic”, meaning one that is in flux, with competing political groups attempting to draw boundaries. Not too dissimilar from America today.

Drawing those boundaries was not done by committee or democratic vote. It was done by those with some power and authority creating boundaries and declaring that if you were outside of them, then you were a deviant. Deviance then, is a social creation. He sites Erdwin Pfuhl’s The Deviance Process (1980). I got quite a few hits for that on google too.

But you don’t really need to read social-psychology to know what he is talking about. Most of us have either experienced this or seen it in the schoolyard. A group sees someone as a threat to their boundaries, so they label them, attach a stigma. Pfuhl, Malina, Neyrey and others help to understand the details of this by giving us some vocabulary. They define the “rule creators”, the “moral entrepreneurs” who construct the norms and the “rule enforcers” who apply them to specific people. They must raise awareness through wide dissemination of the norms and gain public support. They borrow respectability through existing high profile public figures, seek testimonials and solicit endorsements.

They must also create stress in the population so others feel the threat of the deviant is real. They need to show the current rules aren’t covering theirs, that they aren’t being adequately enforced and there are inadequate means to deal with the crisis. Attention is then turned toward individuals. Deviants are identified and their lives are used as examples. If successful, the actual identity of the individual may be replaced by the deviant one in the eyes of the society.

This all sounds kinda evil, but moral entrepreneurship can be benevolent. Mothers Against Drunk Driving is a moral entrepreneur group. I’m not too bothered by their campaigns to prevent drunk driving or that stigmatize people who do it. Even though the drunk driver may be suffering from the illness known as alcoholism and should be treated with compassion, it is hard to put aside the dangerous choice they are making and give them that. And I really don’t know the scope of the problem or what the best preventative measures are, I just see those horrible pictures of cars crumpled next to the ones of the children who died that M.A.D.D. put up on the television. That’s all I need to know.

An unsuccessful moral entrepreneur, at least unsuccessful for me was George W. Bush when he said I was either with him or against him. It didn’t matter what images he put up, I knew I could be faithful to my country without spending more on consumer goods and without being suspicious of anyone who looked like they were from the Middle East. I put a peace sign on my garage and talked to people about how we should not go to war in Iraq.

Back to the parable, we have two individuals, one representing the Temple, the elite, the keeper and enforcer of the rules and one who has had to take a job that is despised by everyone, collecting tolls. They meet during the time of prayer in public. No one there cares much for the toll collector because he is poor and care even less for him because his job involves taking their money. He has little to appeal to in this situation but a higher power. The book, although often a historical analysis, is in the end a Christian book. When it says “higher power”, we know what it means. In this case, “higher power” can be redefined to mean a set of morals and standards that have been arrived at by agreement over generations and the meaning of the parable will still hold.

The Pharisee makes his appeal to anyone who is listening. He speaks loudly about how he is tithing and fasting and makes no bones about shaming the toll collector. To fulfill his role, the toll collector should have just left with his head hung low. Instead he makes his appeal to the higher power quietly with a prayer asking for mercy. This may seem like a simple act and in a more equal world it would be. But in the world of first century Palestine, it is a breakthrough, a slap in the face of the establishment, a return volley against the violence of a system that keeps people like him in poverty, doing work that perpetuates that very system.

And the final comment of the parable is about the toll collector, “…this man went down to his home justified.” 

Common Sense

“Common Sense” is a very short book, written in 1776. It covers a lot of ground. It can be found for free on the Internet in various forms. He eventually gets to talking about the necessity of a Navy for the new country and the importance of acting in a timely manner. But before that he looks at how the whole idea of countries and governments got started in the first place. He has to make some assumptions, but it still is a better place to start than most of the arguments about government that go on today.

When discussing governments these days, either I’m in a room full of people who agree with me that there are few good leaders out there and they are struggling against corruption by big money and political deals that don’t have the best interests of the country in mind. Or, I’m talking to just a few people who think we started out with some very basic values and those values have been corrupted by a post-modern world that wants to redistribute wealth. Both of those points of view involve a lot of assuming and rarely lead to a discussion of what are the basic reasons for government.

Thomas Paine starts his book with basic reasons. In a word, he says governments are for security. He goes on to talk about how we got to the idea of Kings and eventually to the King of England and all the problems with the monarchy and system of succession at that time. He is building a case to convince the American people that it is time to separate themselves from that system and create their own. Regardless of how you feel about how that worked out or whether or not he is being completely honest about his intentions, he presents his case well and it is worth studying his thoughts.

He is a man of his time, and he also has some assumptions he is working with. Although “separation of church and state” would not be uttered for a generation, in the latter half of the book he says, “ For myself, I fully and conscientiously believe that it is the will of the Almighty that there should be a diversity of religious opinions among us.” Then immediately follows that with, “It affords a larger field for our Christian kindness; were we all of one way of thinking, our religious dispositions would want matter for probation; and on this liberal principle I look on the various denominations among us to be like children of the same family, differing only in what is called their Christian names.” This reminded me of the line from The Blues Brothers movie when John Belushi asks a bar owner what kind of music they play, and she says, “both kinds, country and western.”

I digress somewhat, but being a man who lived in a world dominated by Christianity, Paine needs to address it to make a case for such a blasphemous idea as going against the divine right of the King. He does so saying,

“As the exalting one man so greatly above the rest cannot be justified on the equal rights of nature, so neither can it be defended on the authority of scripture; for the will of the Almighty as declared by Gideon, and the prophet Samuel, expressly disapproves of government by Kings.”

In a bit of Biblical analysis that foreshadows the actions of George Washington, Paine recounts the story of Gideon, a conquering general who was offered the crown including succession of his progeny forever. Gideon refused saying, “"I will not rule over you, neither shall my son rule over you. THE LORD SHALL RULE OVER YOU." (Judges 8:23) Not only declining, but denying their right to give it. It was a brilliant argument against monarchy.... for 1776.

In a different time,  1333 BCE, a 9 year old, Tutankhaten acceded to the Egyptian throne. One wonders what divine right he (or his mother) claimed to make such an accession and how he justified restoring the old deities and giving powers back to the priests of Amun.  Probably not something Americans think much about, but many Americans do continue to think about, discuss, even bring up in presidential debate, their Biblical justifications for caring for the poor, giving much to those who from much is expected, the limits of usury, what is or isn’t an abomination, the rights of women and much more.

At some point in the future, if our accumulated knowledge survives long enough, the question of King Tut’s justification for restoring earlier deities will be equivalent to the question of whether or not America was founded as a Christian nation. America will be just another empire that rose and fell and Christianity another religion that reflected the culture of its time. If you disagree, then you are saying that Christianity is unlike any religion that has come before. That it will survive all future changes and encroachments of new knowledge. I’m not so worried about the people who disagree as those who see this future coming, but ignore it.

Introducing Averroes

“Isti, qui negant aliquod ens contingens, exponendi sunt tormentis quousque concedant, quod possibile est eos non torqueri”Translation:“Those who deny the existence of contingency should be tortured until they admit that it is possible for them not to be tortured.” ― Duns Scotus

When I first came across this, I was a bit shocked. Taken literally, it is barbaric. It was written sometime in the late 13^th century, in Europe, which would be known for barbarism. That context doesn’t make it much less shocking. However Duns Scotus was a philosopher, not a member of the Spanish Inquistion.

It is likely that he did not actually intend to have anyone tortured. This quote is supposedly how he demonstrated that we have free will. When he says “contingency” he was talking about what we would today understand as “free will”.  His logic is, if someone is torturing you and you ask them to stop, they would need to have free will to do that. Philosopher’s arguments weren’t all that sophisticated back then. It has the ring of a bully saying, “why are you hitting yourself?” while he has your wrist and is smacking your own hand against your head.

Free will is an important element of Christianity because without it, we could not choose to believe in God or not, or choose to follow his laws or not. If we aren’t doing that, then all of God’s punishments don’t make any sense. They don’t make any sense anyway, especially when someone says an entire nation is punished for something done by one person in a previous generation, but such is the logic of the Bible and its readers.

When someone says that our entire system of law is based on Judeo-Christian thought, this is partly what they are talking about, and they are partly right. Many other religions are based on gods and goddesses that act arbitrarily and take over the minds of people and cause all sorts of things to happen for whatever reason they feel like. Gods not of the Bible often have personality flaws or more human characteristics. God of the Bible sometimes does too, partly because there is the YHWH god and the Elohim god, but that’s a different blog. Most of the time, Judeo-Christian God is absent, speaking through bushes, a still soft voice, or sending cryptic messages via angels. But this idea that we have some ability to reason and make choices is pretty consistent throughout the Bible.

There were of course other gods and philosophies and a strong influence on European thought at the time was the rediscovery of Aristotle. When Rome fell and the tribes of Europe fell into constant warfare, the writings of Plato and Aristotle were mostly lost to the West. They made their way to the new Rome, the Byzantine Empire in what is now Turkey and further East to Baghdad. As the Muslim Empire grew, they translated the Greek writings and expanded on their ideas, leading to what most agree is the beginning of modern science.

The Muslim Empire expanded all the way across Northern Africa and into Spain. Cordoba Spain was a jewel of multi-culturalism, while most of Europe was still in the Dark Ages. I know some will say that things were happening with the Christians, there was Pope Sylvester II who questioned authority and experimented. But then not too much later there was the Inquisition. These conservative and liberal swings continue for centuries, with small advances in ideas like better treatment for slaves, then a return to repression. For the most part, a culture of magic, the divine right of Kings and rule by force prevailed. The Muslim Empire experienced similar swings with only slightly better success during the times when seeking knowledge was encouraged.

During one of those swings, in Spain, a man by the name of Averroes was commissioned to translate Aristotle. This led him to write on how one might reconcile faith, something that all but a very few considered the only way of looking at the world, with reason, something Aristotle spoke of at length. Reading Averroes, you might think he was a bit crazy. It seems like he is rambling, grasping for a thought. You have to keep in mind he didn’t understand how energy gets here from the sun, how mountains were formed by glaciers or how humans evolved from earlier life forms. He was one of the first to guide us toward how we would eventually figure out all those things.

You also have to keep in mind that he was aware of those conservative/liberal swings. He was commissioned by a liberal Caliph, but in his lifetime his works were banned and he was exiled from Spain. Fortunately for him this was brief. He may have wanted to say much more but didn’t out of fear. He may have wanted to say that logically, there is no god, that god is a symbolic construct to help explain our feelings and dreams, that it is used by the powerful to oppress women and justify slavery. That probably would have got him more than exiled. But I don’t know what he thought, only what he wrote.

When his ideas and translations passed into the Universities that were run by the Roman Catholic Church, they met with more trouble. Thomas Aquinas attempted to work out his own version of reconciling faith and reason. Then in 1277, most philosophy was banned from being taught. The bans were eventually lifted and Aquinas was eventually given sainthood, but not without much wailing and gnashing of teeth. It was William of Ockham who came up with the formula that allowed science to move forward and religion to maintain its hold on the hearts of men.

According to Ockham, God creates the universe and can do whatever he wants. We discover patterns in that creation, but reason is not inherent in nature, it is only in our minds. We can explain nature, but we can’t explain God. This answers Euthyphro’s dilemma by saying good is what God declares good. The Church is the only authority to say why or to determine what is evil and who should be punished for it. Science is left to discover patterns all it wants, but has no say about what the church says is a miracle.

Under that system, Galileo was given a tour of the torture chamber. Under that system, the Church went through a string of some of its worse Popes until Luther had his say. Against that system, governments finally started to build walls against the influence. The recent political debates have me wondering if we have made much progress in the last 1,000 years. 

Fat Albert

When Bill Cosby first introduced Fat Albert in his standup routines, he told a story about scaring him with a big statue and how Fat Albert crushed his friend when he panicked. He got a big laugh. Then he said, “I told you that story so I could tell you this one”, and told another Fat Albert story. I did last week’s blog so I could do this one.

Before I started this blog, not just this post, the whole thing, I discovered something called the “Emergent Church” or some say the “Emerging Church”. Phyllis Tickle gives a great explanation of it here.

Phyllis Tickle and the rose

I eventually came across the guy who everybody points to as getting the idea started. His name is Brian McLaren. He became an Evangelical pastor a little later in life and figured if he was going to be serious about it, he should go meet some of these poor people he was preaching about. He has since visited a variety of cultures and gained a deep understanding of what it is to be poor. He has sat through meetings where people who are on the ground, with their elbows deep in helping oppressed people have challenged religious leaders to do more than just pray for those people. He has seen people shift their thinking from other worldly thoughts to a hands-on focus of what needs to be done to make this earth heavenly. So, I was kinda excited about reading one of the books central to his message, Everything Must Change.

I was disappointed.

He starts with his personal story then asks, what do we do now? He looks at the global priorities of a few global organizations. Okay. Then he makes up an oversimplified model of the gears of society as they currently turn. Next he talks about how we should frame our discussion and our work and attempts to use Biblical stories to do it. I agree strongly with the problems he points out with the framing stories that were used to subjugate the peasants of Europe and build the not-so-holy Roman Catholic Empire, but I cringe when he tries to create a new framing story.

He seems to be familiar with the type of analysis I found in Parables as Subversive Speech, but I read every footnote and it ain’t in there. It’s as if he wants to use some of that history, but not all of it, only the parts that fit his preconceived ideas. Basically the same sort of cherry picking that every theologian throughout history has done. But I don’t know if he has read Parables as Subversive Speech or not, so it may be that his view of history is incomplete, or just different from mine.

When he talks about parables with stewards in them, he comes very close to describing the world described by the historian Lenski. But when he analyzes the Parable of the Unjust Steward, he selects a theology that involves gathering up points for heaven instead of viewing the steward as someone who is a cog in a corrupt system, who does what he can with the tools he has. He praises the steward for “switching sides”. Since the steward would be switching to the side of the peasants, McLaren doesn’t have an explanation for his boss praising his actions. He leaves you dangling with an incomplete interpretation, making you figure it out. Maybe that confusing line was Jesus adding a tag line to the parable. What does Brian think? Who knows?

McLaren has a huge heart, a sharp mind and I hope his hands continue to do good work. He has no reason to care about what I have said here. He is having success turning eyes away from invisible things in the clouds down to the not so pretty problems with creation. We need that. The question is, if we maintain a view that still includes focusing on invisible things, will we be able to fix those problems or just be faced with different ones later?

Is his framing story different enough to make a difference? I’m wondering if it is different at all. After discussing some parables and providing some translations from the Greek and pointing out some Bible passages that could be said to contradict the idea of a Jesus that came to support a right-wing political agenda of rules about what people do in the bedroom or how they should treat their slaves, he starts listing what he thinks are the right things to do. Personally, I find these things non-controversial, like caring for people who have less than me, looking for peaceful resolutions to conflicts, paying people what they are worth, stuff like that.

The rest of the book is lists of ideas like this, interspersed with data about how those things are not happening now; like how many people live on less than a dollar day, or don’t have access to clean water. If you don’t know about those things and you think God is doing a good job, buy this book, otherwise don’t bother.

When he says “Everything Must Change”, by “Everything” he means the ancient framing story that got us into this mess. If you believe in that story, he is only asking you to change a little bit. At the end of one of those lists of what he thinks you should be doing, he says, we can accomplish them by “following a weaponless prophet in Galilee”. He doesn't explain that, he just makes up what Jesus might do if he were incarnate today.

So, really, you get to leave quite a bit unchanged. For that reason, I believe this framing story will fail in basically the same way the current one is failing. By loosely connecting the list of good ideas to an interpretation of some scripture, the door is wide open to altering the interpretation and picking different scripture to justify a different list. I really don’t know if McLaren’s reading of Greek is accurate or not. Since he knows I could check up on him, I hope he is honest, but very few people will do that work or even care to. And we don’t know if the future will continue to bring us the amazingly easy access to information that we have been given in the last few decades. Very small changes could put us back in the Dark Ages when a few people told everybody else what the Bible meant.

There are other framing stories. Just because I don’t offer an alternative in this week’s blog doesn’t mean they aren’t there or they are not valid. McLaren is on a parallel track with some of those stories, but his track is going to run out. I’m not worried about him causing a train wreck and hope to meet up with him further on down the line.

Shrewd or Unjust?

I don’t have a Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. blog this year as I have in years past. However, I will make a comparison before I get started. Not the usual, obvious comparisons of what is similar between his life and Jesus’ but how we treat the two differently.

You can’t tell the story of Martin Luther King Jr. without mentioning churches. You could skip the details of his career as a pastor but if you are telling the story with any detail at all, you would have to mention that he used the structure of the Southern Baptist church to do much of his organizing. You would not however need to stress these details or explain them. Churches and organizing just go together. When telling the story of Jesus, the context of his Jewish community is commonly left out, everything is fit into what his legacy eventually became. That is, the theology we humans have created.

Another set of details is normally left out and is not required to understand Rev. King’s part in the civil rights movement. That is, he liked to party on occasion. And he had some marital problems. There are websites dedicated to this. There are people that believe it defines the man and the movement and negates the progress that was made. Fortunately those people are few and far between. For most people, a simple examination of life in 1950’s America compared to life in the 1970’s is enough to understand the importance of what was accomplished in the 1960’s.

That is not to say that the movement was simple. Forces were at play for centuries leading to those momentous years. The individual actions of the Freedom Riders and people who did seemingly simple things like sitting at a “Whites Only” café were profound and heroic. We are getting far enough away from those actions that it is necessary to not only tell the story of those heroes, it is necessary to explain why it was heroic, why there was a “Whites Only” café in the first place. We are not so far away that the full contexts of the stories are inaccessible or the meaning of the details of actions and words are indecipherable.

When we tell the story of Martin Luther King Jr. we don’t need to embellish the man. Some may object that his role as pastor is not highlighted enough, others that his influence from the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hhan is rarely mentioned. Once these things are mentioned, what else is there to say? If his title as Reverend was the factor that made him great, then why didn’t a different Reverend accomplish what he did? If it was the influence of Christianity, why was such a Christian nation so slow in dealing with its civil rights problems in the first place? When we examine how the movement took hold, we only need to examine the words that were spoken, the deals that were made, the strategies that were applied, the causes and the affects.

We can examine those things in great detail. When King started his “I Have a Dream” speech, he talked about coming to Washington to “cash a check”. We know what that means. We can view the video from that day and see that that phrase was not very inspiring; the crowd was not reacting to it. We know his speech writer and he tells us that King had alternative scripts that he could use to improvise. When he moves on to drawing from the My Country Tis of Thee and the Old Testament, we know where he got those lines and we can see that his audience ate it up. We know why he choose those words and can marvel at his genius at being able to pull them up at that moment and inspire 250,000 people that day as well as generations to come.

We can only scratch the surface when attempting to do that with the Bible. When the New Testament talks of the “New Covenant”, we don’t know when exactly that started, or what changes to the laws of Moses it actually covered. The Old Testament refers to earlier books that we only know of because of those passages. We don’t know if they are quoted accurately or who wrote them. When Jesus tells the Parable of the Unjust Steward, we don’t know how his audience reacted.  That of course doesn’t stop people from claiming that they do know. Many people are quite sure they do know exactly what Jesus meant. Unfortunately for the rest of us, this is written on their heart, and we can’t read that.  

When we look at the life of Martin Luther King Jr. we don’t need to first create a mythology and then fit his life into it. His accomplishments stand on their own. We know what he was trying to do and how well he did it. When looking at the words of a small group of Jews in Palestine 2,000 years ago, we can’t be sure what they were trying to do. When we try to figure it out, we are stymied by ancient languages and symbolism that was already becoming arcane at the time. Records were not made until decades after the event. Enough of it was timeless, universal and powerful that it survived, but its original form has been lost.

Very few books, articles or sermons even attempt to examine the details of the words attributed to Jesus without first presupposing a theology. One that I just started is “Parables as Subversive Speech” by William Herzog. He draws heavily the history scholarship of Gerhard Lenski and compares the scriptures to the teaching work of Paulo Freire He takes a line by line analysis of several parables and tests them against his hypothesis. He synthesizes, compares and contrasts his conclusions with those of several theologians in the last century as he goes. I’ll spare you most of those details but supply enough of them to give you an idea of what this reveals.

The parable I’ll use as an example comes from Luke 16 and is sometimes called “The Parable of the Shrewd Manager” or sometimes “The Parable of the Unjust Steward”. The naming problem indicates the difficulty theologians have had. Later we’ll see how Luke himself may have been wrestling with what was meant. The parable begins:

 ¹ Jesus told his disciples: “There was a rich man whose manager was accused of wasting his possessions. ² So he called him in and asked him, ‘What is this I hear about you? Give an account of your management, because you cannot be manager any longer.’

The first problem is determining who the characters are intended to represent. Many assume the rich man is a representation of God. This becomes a problem later as we shall see. Herzog sees these characters as representing exactly what the story says they are. What is missing, what is not supplied in the Bible, is an understanding of the roles these people would have played. More on that as the story unfolds.

We are also limited by the English language with the word “accused”. It doesn’t tell us if the accusation is false, verified, or groundless. According to some, the verb diaballo from the original text could imply a slanderous accusation. From history, we can know the manager is in a tenuous position. Neither the rich man nor his debtors completely trust him. He has to please both of them while attempting to gain profits from them.

Many interpreters also apply a capitalist’s viewpoint to these opening statements. Assumptions are made that the manager has failed in his ability to extract the correct amount of interest, or was accused of the type of banking malfeasance that we have seen in recent decades. If the setting of the story is a Jewish community, that analysis could not apply. The laws of Moses were clear on the subject of usury. That is not to say that there weren’t ways around those laws. Rather than looking for who is corrupt and who is just in this parable, it may make more sense if we see the whole corrupt system; the oppressors have found ways to hide the interest they are charging and the oppressed find it necessary to lie just to survive.

Some highlight the fact that the steward is not immediately dismissed, saying this is an act of Godly forgiveness. Instead he is told to get his books in order and explain his accounting. Some also note that the steward does not put up a protest, a seeming admission of guilt. It could be that he knows he is in a position of low power and a public display would only make matters worse for him.

Next we hear the thoughts of the manager, who has been accused of cheating the rich man,

   ³ “The manager said to himself, ‘What shall I do now? My master is taking away my job. I’m not strong enough to dig, and I’m ashamed to beg— ⁴ I know what I’ll do so that, when I lose my job here, people will welcome me into their houses.’

A simple reading of this, with 21st century eyes, might sound like this manager is weak, not willing to do some hard work. What he would have known that isn’t explained to us here is that the demotion he is looking at, to beggar or laborer, is closer to a death sentence. Laborers did not enjoy long healthy lives. They worked hard because of the threat of becoming beggars. Once a beggar, his life may only last a few more years. Managers such as he were motivated by this threat and rich men made sure to maintain the pool of beggars through arbitrary firings.

   ⁵ “So he called in each one of his master’s debtors. He asked the first, ‘How much do you owe my master?’
   ⁶ “‘Nine hundred gallons of olive oil,’ he replied.
   “The manager told him, ‘Take your bill, sit down quickly, and make it four hundred and fifty.’

A fifty percent cut. Anyone can easily understand this was good for the debtors. Who are these debtors? There were not very many middle men in this system. Most likely these are the people who worked the land. They might have been some type of merchant, the power relationships change little if they were.  If they were tenants, they would keep some of the produce for themselves, but must give much of it to the manager. The manager is probably taking a small cut of his own, off the books, and the land owner gets the lion’s share, but he in turn he is taxed by the Romans and is in constant competition with those of his class.

   ⁷ “Then he asked the second, ‘And how much do you owe?’
   “‘A thousand bushels of wheat,’ he replied.
   “He told him, ‘Take your bill and make it eight hundred.’

The rich man is telling his tenants (the debtors) to grow olive oil and wheat.  From the perspective of our culture where all produce is a commodity, this doesn’t tell us much. A little understanding of agriculture at that time tells us much. The audience hearing these words would know that the rich man had used Roman law to force the peasants from their land and turned it from land that provided food for them to land that produced a commodity. Where once they could live off that land with their own labor, they now had to work for the rich man for whatever meager wage he would supply. The manager’s job was not only to handle the books and run the errands; he needed to know just how much he could squeeze out of the peasants. The master is careful to keep his hands clean of this and no matter how the manager explains his accounting; he will end up being blamed for some kind of wrongdoing.

Note also that the steward deals with each debtor individually. The debtors are not aware the he is about to be let go. They are all aware of the inherent corruption of the system and recognize that the amounts of the reductions are equivalent to the hidden interest. This paints the rich man into a corner and provides an explanation for the punch line of the parable.

   ^8a “The master commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly.

This is the difficult line, actually half line, that anyone who has equated the rich man, now referred to as the master, with God or Jesus or anything good. That good character is now praising the manager for cutting deals that significantly reduce his profits. If up to now you have painted the manager as lazy or corrupt, why is the master suddenly praising him? If the riches of the oil and wheat are equated with riches in heaven, why is it good that he reduced their value?

Herzog and others assume that the manager has brought the debtors and master together, back in the public light, putting the master in a position of refusing to honor the negotiations of the lowered prices, thus hurting his relationship with the debtors, or honoring them and saving face. If he protested, he would have to argue that he deserved the interest payment that was kept secret by silent agreement. His loss will only be short term. The debtors know they have got away with a deal this time but it won’t happen again soon. So the rich man has lost this hand, but new cards have been dealt for him.

In the end, all parties, normally at odds with each other, are happy with the current outcome and praising each other. The steward, although weak, has used one of the few weapons at his disposal to demonstrate his value. Briefly, the distinction of mine and thine was erased, giving all a glimpse of a more just world.

The following verses may or may not be from the original parable. This post is longer than usual and you may qualify for canonization if you have read this far. I won’t bore you with more details about when the book of Luke was written, who the actual author might have been, what his style was or any of the four or more theories about where this parable actually ends. Suffice it to say that these verses appear to be attempts to make sense of the parable, just as we are doing now.

^8b For the people of this world are more shrewd in dealing with their own kind than are the people of the light. ⁹ I tell you, use worldly wealth to gain friends for yourselves, so that when it is gone, you will be welcomed into eternal dwellings.
   ¹⁰ “Whoever can be trusted with very little can also be trusted with much, and whoever is dishonest with very little will also be dishonest with much. ¹¹ So if you have not been trustworthy in handling worldly wealth, who will trust you with true riches? ¹² And if you have not been trustworthy with someone else’s property, who will give you property of your own?
   ¹³ “No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.”
 ¹⁴ The Pharisees, who loved money, heard all this and were sneering at Jesus. ¹⁵ He said to them, “You are the ones who justify yourselves in the eyes of others, but God knows your hearts. What people value highly is detestable in God’s sight.

*** Footnotes and references should be provided to clarify the reliability of statements in this article. I decided to forego them and refer you to Herzog’s work, a thorough and scholarly thesis. 

2012 Kickoff

Over the course of the last several years, I have searched for a perspective on ancient scriptures that could make sense. I discovered there are 30,000 perspectives on Christianity including something called The Emerging Church. I found an activist in my area who says that every church should be a peace church. For Christmas, I got a few books that have been on my list for a while, one of them says Everything Must Change. While waiting to unwrap them, I came across a tattoed, sarcastic Lutheran.

When I tired of looking for new leaders, I looked into more details about the old and dead people they were referencing, and found there was not much new under the sun. The recent authors, writers and leaders have brought some fresh language, some challenges that are more entertaining than the typical Sunday Sermon and, although it can’t proven, hopefully they have inspired some young people to participate in a world that would be happy to have them be disenfranchised consumers of a prepackaged culture. But the core message only changes slightly in flavor, not substance, and the substance is still paper thin.

Seeing young people inspired is an inspiration in itself. But it is not enough. Religion has been on the skids for 500 years. Warmed over versions of it have shown its amazing staying power but they don’t indicate real change. The latest techno hip-hop networked version is not emerging as anything that will stand out when this millennium is reviewed.

As I prefer concrete examples, take a closer look at the Sarcastic Lutheran’s sermon about Jesus walking on water and inspiring Peter to have faith and do the same.

The new packaging starts with the ripping of the old interpretation of the parable. And I agree completely with her assessment that simply telling someone to have faith doesn’t accomplish much. This begs the question of why she is there preaching on that very story, and she addresses that directly. She answers that God’s story speaks to us better than any other story. She only offers this as an assertion then moves on to suggesting ways to find yourself in the story. This is slightly better than just telling you what a sinner you are or who you should be, but she gets to the “shoulds” soon enough.

She moves on to her new and improved insight for the parable. She switches from you wanting to go walk on the water, to seeing that Jesus is coming to you. I see a room of twenty somethings leaning forward as Nadia dances through that first half of the sermon, then slumping back, some showing disappointment, some looking thoughtful as they try to figure out what the message was. Perhaps they discuss it over a macchiatto, or send a tweet, “Jesus walks on the water towards me #parable”. Hopefully they feel the sense of community as they clean up the park or visit the nursing home.

  

On to Christmas Day

When I unwrapped my books, I couldn’t decide on just one so I had to skim several. I found that Brian McLaren’s title “Everything Must Change” came from a Burundi woman living in Rwanda. He had met her while there on a mission trip just after the war in that country. They had been discussing the “essential” message of Jesus. The woman was stunned by this discussion and realized,

“I see that it is about changing this world, not just escaping it and retreating into our churches. If Jesus’ message of the Kingdom of God is true, then everything must change. Everything must change.”

He goes on in the book to explain how he went through a personal conversion, from wanting to organize a church with celebrations and support groups to becoming a participant in working on global problems. I was attracted to the book because I agree that everything must change, or it is unlikely that anything resembling our current civilization will survive. What I doubt the book will address is why the presupposition of “If Jesus’ message…” is needed.

And Into the New Year

One of the other books I got comes a little closer to answering that. This one has been on my list for a long time. It contains a discussion of the original interpreter of The Parable of the Talents that inspired this blog. It is a rare look at the first century using historical analysis, rather than a theological one. There are attempts at this that claim to use historical analysis and the author, William Herzog, addresses them in his Introduction. He realized that previous interpreters started with an idea of what Jesus’ ministry was then fit the interpretation of the parables into that framework.

This would be expected in theology. There is an overriding theme that Jesus came to die for our sins and everything has to fit into that. An historical analysis can’t make such an assumption, or even assume that Jesus was thinking it when he spoke. In fact, an historical analysis can’t even assume that Jesus was an actual person that ever walked on this earth. The book does not go that far.

The sub-title of the book is “Jesus as Pedagogue of the Oppressed”, and that is the assumption, the hypothesis, that he attempts to test against the analysis of the parables. He is selective of scripture and admits that it will not work on all scripture. He acknowledges the possibility that scripture may not always accurately reflect the original teachings either by misrepresentation from the time they were written or the introduction of later errors. I have only just started the book, but as yet I don’t see any hint that he would consider Jesus was a made up character.

So his historiography may not be perfect, but I am not aware of any similar application to this particular subject. With the increasingly disappointing results from theology in a world in need of teachers, it is long overdue.