NT Wright, another disappointmnet

I was recently given a recommendation to look into N.T. (Tom) Wright in this exchange on a Patheo's blogger's comment section. Rebecca Florence Miller is currently my favorite Christian blogger, and she's very responsive to her readers, so I wanted to take it seriously.

Lausten North • 8 days ago
Rebecca, you make a comment in passing, "neo-Platonic treatment of the physical as “lower” and the spiritual as “higher” ". I've heard this in many forms, but still can't see this as something neo-Platonism introduced into Christianity. It sure looks like it was there all along. Any references you could recommend? I know there are non-Platonic passages in the Bible, but that doesn't mean dualism came from Greece and Christianity is strictly about earthly renewal. I need more cultural context to make that case.

Rebecca Florence Miller Mod  Lausten North • 8 days ago
Honestly, I would recommend reading N.T. Wright's Surprised by Hope. It deals with the argument for this far better than I could.
For me personally, I think the incarnation is one of the best arguments for the earthy kingdom of God. God comes DOWN to us in physical, corporeal form rather than asking to rise UP to God in spirit form. The physical is hallowed because God created it. When God created it, it was called "good" and that is still true, though it is broken by sin. In the resurrection, we see Jesus being the "firstfruits" of the resurrection work God plans to bring about for all of creation. In the final book of the Bible, we see the new heavens and new earth coming DOWN to earth. Again the physical creation is hallowed.
It's easy to draw out a proof text and try to make it say that the physical is bad in and of itself. But that ignores the larger narrative of Scripture and especially the centrality of the incarnation.

The exchange continues for a bit, and I interacted with another commenter, but it wasn't productive. It's not the first I've heard of this "Plato screwed up Christianity" thing either. Tony Jones gave me a longer but similar response in his"Questions that Haunt" series. You can see that in the preview of the published version in book form on amazon.

I've heard of N.T. Wright. He is referenced often by progressive Christians. But I don't feel like reading another book that I'm almost certain will disappoint me. So, I went to Google University to find out what I could. I found out he supports the defense of marriage, which is the nice way of saying he is against homosexual marriage. Somehow it interferes with the marriage of Christ and the Church or something. Really don't care. Strike one.

I found an hour long interview that touches on his latest book. It also includes a classic straw man argument against atheism, saying atheists view the physical world as inanimate and something to be exploited. Strike two. It ends with an open question. He is asked what he would like to highlight, what question wasn't asked in the interview that he would like to bring up. He says, Jesus. It's all about Jesus. We just need to keep learning about Jesus. We'll never completely understand him, but he's been important for 2,000 years, therefore he is important, Jesus. Okay, well, strike three.

Read on if you can. He has been called the successor to C.S. Lewis. I don't see how he has improved on that, and C.S. Lewis has been soundly refuted. If this is as good as it gets, progressive Christianity is in big trouble.

The interview begins with an introduction to Wright's book about "The Good News" which seems to be about acknowledging that Jesus is doing something and will continue. Exactly what that is, is not made clear. He discusses how Octavian proclaimed he had brought peace to the world, but of course he had done it through killing off his enemies. The wars in the Old Testament or people burning in Revelations is not brought at any point in this interview.

Wright denigrates how Christianity has devolved into the idea of scripture just being "good advice". Whether that be instructions on how to get to heaven or more practical knowledge about what you should do or believe at any given moment. To him, the Bible also gets you to consider what changes to the world happened when Jesus arrived, the coming of the Kingdom. Ideas that came up much later, like Purgatory are really not relevant to him. He calls these ideas a "corrupted" version of what the Bible teaches. Typical progressive stuff, begin by putting down old time religion without mentioning any names.

They discuss how Paul himself noted that the gospels are "foolishness" to some. That would have been even easier to see at the time when you consider how crucifixion was viewed. To say that was the messiah would seem ludicrous. The expectation of God stepping in solving all the problems of the Jews was not realized.

Even today, the resurrection is dismissed and people want to listen only to the ethical teachings of Jesus. Wright notes that Jesus speaks to the wicked things that come out of our hearts. The cure that he offers is his own sacrifice, not a psychology or method that can overcome that wickedness. He admits this is "cryptic", but states that it is clear that what Jesus is bringing is the Kingdom. It is also clear that we need the resurrection to be victorious over the "dark forces". All the teachings, no matter how good, can't do that. At this point, Wright says this is a difficult to get your mind around, "our whole thought patterns are not designed to do that, but Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are doing exactly that". In other words, don't think for yourself, just read the Bible. Throughout the interview, he continues to say the message is not a recipe, but he leaves it a mystery as to what the message actually is.

In keeping with every major theologian for the last couple hundred years, he blames Western individualism for the problem of people watering down the language of the Bible and dismissing the transformation of creation that Jesus brought. He brings in Platonism at this point too, saying Plato brought us this idea that the world we see is one of shadows and corruption and the answer to that is to find another world outside of that and figure out the keys to getting there. In the same breath, he makes sure that we don't think he is becoming a materialist. In the Biblical view, or I would say his view of the Bible, heaven and earth overlap and interlock.

I agree with his thoughts on not being a Platonist, but he offers nothing here to explain how this was strictly a Greek idea and that it somehow infected the Jewish tradition around the time Christianity was forming. Surely just the idea of God as lawgiver is an example of something better "up there" and nothing but sinners down here. If he explains this better in a book somewhere, please provide a reference.

He covers pantheists too, and makes a bit of a truce with them. He recognizes that there are Christians who act more like pantheists, reveling in the beauty of creation. Wright says, God will do his thing and we should support that. God has begun the work of radical renewal with Jesus, after already having given us the responsibility for the earth in Genesis. This is somehow better than doing good things because you feel called by the beauty and grace of nature itself.

At minute 32, he addresses the myth of progress. I happen to agree with that. Progress has not been a steady stream of great ideas, each better than the last. But he slides over into moral progress and points out that sexual norms were loosened in the 1960's and then "people were given carte blanche to abuse children and cover it up". That is so unbelievably slimey. Child abuse was not invented in 1972. The reason we know more about it now is that we have made it harder to cover it up. It get's harder to keep going at this point, but stay with me if you have the stomach.

He goes on to blame "The Western Enlightenment" for prejudice. He makes no case for it, he just says it. He describes the natural human response to seeing people who don't look like us, for example Muslim terrorists killing other Muslims, and says we feel something, but mostly we feel disconnected from them since we don't see them as part of our community. God's community of course is the whole world and that's how we should see them. He doesn't mention anything about "chosen ones" or "tribes of Israel" or Jesus being transformed into a handsome blue eyed man that would have been completely out of place in 1^st century Palestine.

He recommends a book "Who is this Man" about how Christians have made the world better. From the reviews it sounds atrocious. 

The next few minutes are a rambling dance through history about God doing new things just when needed and people corrupting the ideas of great theologians like Aquinas. He never describes good or bad or acknowledges that Aquinas' works were banned in his lifetime, he just says God is good and people are sometimes bad.

He also makes one of those points that baffles me about progressive Christians. He remembers being taught that The Reformation was a "great light" where God allowed the Bible to come forward and everyone would understand what was really in it. But as he later found out through his studies, opening up the question of what IS right led to wars among themselves. He recognizes, and realizes people today recognize, that is NOT the way to discover which interpretation is right. He also recognizes that recent history doesn't show that we've advanced much beyond that. He recognizes these are serious issues to be wrestled with, but offers nothing in the way of how to do that. Other than, Jesus.

This is immediately followed by a criticism of modern atheism. In it, he denigrates the very tools and methods which have been created to discuss our differences and learn how we can live together. He brings up pantheism again, saying that results from eliminating Gods. People still notice forces of nature that they can't explain. He somehow relates this to Nazism, again ignoring 2,000 years of antisemitism.

He compares God's creation to the naturalist view, saying God gave us the world as a gift and for us to be stewards, but God is still in charge, and the naturalist view is one of exploitation. I suppose every Christian throughout history who took God's commands to use the world as they needed was just wrong. Wright even relates worship to stewardship, saying we are here to articulate the joy of creation through our speech and our rituals. This, according to Wright results in a much better relationship with the world than one where you think of the world as "miscellaneous, inanimate stuff that we can do what we like with". He says this understanding of the order of things is "remarkably exciting" and leads to us being "humble of our role within it."

This is why I don't see progressive Christianity as progressive at all. What we have discovered by starting with a premise that we won't rely on a supernatural explanation, is that we are far more integrated into this world than we ever knew. We discovered the universe was billions of times bigger than we thought and not too long after that, we found that our very chemistry was part of the early stars that formed a long time ago.

We don't need an invisible hierarchy telling us we need to take care of this world, we have found that our very existence depends on us doing that. If that is not something to celebrate and at the same time make you humble, I don't know what is. At best, we can thank religion for an intuitive recognition of our connection to the universe and for finding a way to mythologize that intuition and encourage each generation to internalize it. But we now understand where those feelings come from and we can strip away the false parts of the belief system that are no longer functional and in fact harmful.

Next is ethics. He talks about baptism, sin, dying to sin and the resurrection and belief therein, taking up your cross, etc. I don't see any point in discussing it. The interviewer however makes an interesting comparison. He compares Plato's Republic, where reaching "the good city" is difficult, it is only dimly available to us, to how Jesus starts off the Sermon the Mount with "You are the light of the world." He and Wright think this is awesome, and who wouldn't? That is the appeal of religion. It would be a great message, if it were true. Someone is telling you how cool you are and how important you are. Then they tell you to give away all your stuff. I always wondered who actually ended up with all that stuff. The Bible doesn't mention it, but now we have accountants who can tell you.

At 53 minutes they start talking about philosophy. He summarizes the central questions that all philosophers are asking and have asked, what is there, how do we know things, and how do we behave. This is the triangle of physics, logic and ethics. He wraps them up beautifully, if you want to act ethically "and you are thinking clearly (logic) you should be able to see human behavior ought to be consonant with the way things are (physics)". He then relates this to Paul, but says Paul doesn't spell it out, but he is seeing the new way to behave, brought on by Christ, read Chapter 14 of Paul and the Faithfulness of God if you want more on that. He just overlays these claims of Paul and says they are central to the triangle. But, he says, this is not a different world, they overlap, because Jesus was here, new creation, something, something.

Wright offers a way out of fundamentalism, or he at least points to a flaw in it, that it looks for a new set of rules to live by, a way out of this world, but he offers no tools for what to do once you get away from fundamentalism. He drops you off in the new New Jerusalem, then turns the van around and goes looking for some new disciples. "Just don't sin", he yells as he drives off.

Logic and reason promise you nothing, in fact, to use them properly, you have to accept that they may lead you to discover that they don't work. The premise of naturalism is a premise, and it must be allowed to question it, or it's not a premise, it's a belief. They regularly lead you to conclusions that contradict earlier conclusions that were arrived at by logic and reason. This is not a bug, it's a feature. It is not a flaw of logic, it is the result of building on each new discovery and each new result of each new experiment arrived at using new data. Jesus just keeps leading you back to Jesus and the promise of a shining city on the hill. But it is never anymore than that, a promise.

The final question is the kicker. It makes it clear that everything I interpret from everything else he says is accurate. You have to wonder if you are getting the full picture in a one hour interview. But the interviewer allows Wright to pick his own topic and fill in whatever he wants. His choice, Jesus. Keep studying the gospels and learn about Jesus. Because we still don't understand him and can't. Intellectually or personally, you need to get back to Jesus. "Ultimately it all comes back to Jesus."

Shouldn’t we just let them die?

@starvingAfrican

I hear this phrased in more benign terms from some of the nicest people I know. And, if you’re being completely objective, the question of whether or not we should work to sustain a population of 7 billion and growing is a valid question, worth considering. But if you decide that it’s better for fewer people to be alive so that more of the living can have a higher quality of life, you have put a rather heavy burden on yourself. You have to choose who dies.

It’s been said that all great men are also bad men. If you look at all of the presidents of the United States, no matter how you rank them by greatness, all of them sent people to their death. Alexander THE GREAT, killed a lot of people. Ghengis Khan decided that it would be better if there were less Chinese and solved the problem the old fashion way. Recently, more and more women are joining the ranks of great leaders. But most of don’t think that way, and don’t have to.

It’s a little more benign to look at a population that is struggling, perhaps starving and instead of asking if we should kill them, ask how much help should we give them? Parents have to make that kind of decision with their own children all the time. How long do you allow them to live in your basement? Maybe a better analogy is our neighbors or friends. Do we keep letting them borrow our tools and giving them cups of sugar, or do we start dropping hints about their lifestyle choices?

If you just arrived here by spaceship and looked at the situation, you might see a hopeless situation in sub-Saharan Africa and wonder why any effort is being put into it. I could say those are not very compassionate creatures in the spaceship, but that would be only focusing on the compassion for the starving children in Africa. Maybe those aliens are feeling compassion for the countries who can grow plenty of food, but still need to consider how to take care of their own.

Now we’re into a classic moral dilemma of the choice of killing one person or five. Most people want to find a way out of having to make that decision.

 

The answer is easier than you might think. We didn’t just arrive here on a spaceship. We have well documented history of how we ended up with 2 billion people living on a few dollars a day.

One graphic example is Haiti. In the Western Hemisphere full of prosperous nations and fertile land, they are impoverished and hungry. Even on their little island, things get better just by crossing the border into the Dominican Republic. Both sides of that island get the hurricanes and earthquakes, how can they be so different? The reasons go all the way back to where Columbus happened to land and how Spain divided it up, how they cut the trees in Haiti and shipped them off to Europe while the Dominican Republic decided to create a slower growing but more sustainable economy, but a big part of Haiti’s problems happened in my lifetime.

Haiti border with Dominican Republic

Their problems are the result of a decision made early on when America first started sending food aid to other countries. The decision was to not make aid a burden on our farmers. If we were to help other countries with food, that should be something all of us participate in. To do that, our government buys surplus commodities in years when yields are high. Instead of letting the price drop so farmers lose money and even go bankrupt, we all buy that surplus with our tax dollars. Some of it is stored and some is sent to where there is drought or war or natural disasters or wherever there is need.

Haiti has been a recipient of aid like this. Then in the 1990’s, with bipartisan support, tariffs on U.S. rice imported to Haiti were dropped from 50% to 3%. Rice produced in Haiti that was selling for over $5, now competes with subsidized U.S. rice for around $3. Sounds great for us, but what happened there? Haiti doesn’t have the infrastructure we have. They don’t have grain elevators. They don’t have loans for farmers. That doesn’t mean they don’t have farmers. It means those farmers bank on their crops coming in every year and getting a decent price. Economics 101, what happens when you dump a huge surplus of a commodity into a delicate economic system like that?

By providing aid to Haiti in the way we did, we made the work of all of those farmers worthless. It only took one season for many, over half of them had no choice but to sell everything, move to the city, try to find work, and take the handouts we gave them. We destroyed what fragile agri-business they had.

www.acumen.org

I said the answer was easy, and maybe I over simplify it, but in a sentence, what we should be doing is sending our technology, our ideas about building infrastructure, not just food. Sure, sometimes the food isn’t there, no matter what you do right, and we make the choice of letting our surplus rot or feeding someone who is dying. I don’t find that a hard choice. The hard choices are how much to give away, how to assist without creating dependency, and how to decide when a nation is ready to be on its own.

If you only take that spaceship view and ask why should we help them when they are doing nothing for us, again, look at history. Look at how we stripped resources from Haiti and Africa not to mention exploiting their labor. Europeans did not build the U.S. from a wilderness. It was being farmed and managed long before we got here.

www.heifer.org

We’re getting better at all of this. The Heifer project doesn’t give away food, it makes a loan of living animals or farming supplies with the expectation that will be paid back. And it usually is. Building infrastructure doesn’t need to be done for free. It may seem strange to profit from an impoverished population, but you’re wearing clothes and using technology that does just that. It can be done in a way that grows their economy and leads to sustainability instead of destroying whole environments. Acumen and Oxfam have been doing this for a long time.

The original question then looms up again, but in different a way. If we grow the economy in these starved areas, won’t they just have more babies? Historically, the answer to that is no. When people see a society that will care for them in old age, they don’t have a bunch of children in the hopes a few of them will live and be able to support them later. That’s the kind of decisions humans made for hundreds and thousands of years. It’s why you are here, but we have better ways of surviving now. When there is a middle class, when people can see a bright future for their children, they have less of them. The phenomenon of well off people having large families is very recent, and I hope it is isolated.

www.oxfam.org

This has happened consistently for hundred of years, since we have been transitioning from an agrarian society to an industrialized one and hopefully now into a sustainable one. This is not a dream. It is not a fantasy. It’s already being done in small ways. We don’t have to choose between our own survival and the survival of millions of starving babies. Our actual choice is between ignoring our neighbors or getting to know them and how what we do affects them.

Taste of the BWCA

I found this one at TJ's Country Store in Mahtowa, MN, where the wurst is best. Seriously, they make a huge range of bratwursts and jerkies and they have locally made cheeses. If you don't know what the Boundary Waters are, google it. Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness is the full name and pretty much describes it. The only problem here is, you shouldn't take glass with you when you go there. Camp responsibly, take only pictures and leave only footprints, but when you get back to civilization, have one of these to refresh. It is not too syrupy but sweet enough to replenish the sugars you burned while portaging your canoe 100 rods. Even if you're not a creme soda lover, you might want to try this one. The flavor is not overpowering and leaves no after taste.

It's on you

This answer to an audience question from Tony Jones presents a huge dilemma to Christians. He is saying the political statements of the past that were justified by religion, but have since been determined to be wrong, must be addressed by Christians today. In my opinion, that they aren’t addressed accounts for many of the reasons people say they don’t go to church today.

Tony Jones at his book opening

It can’t be avoided. If you say Tony is wrong, you’re making a political statement yourself. The question (not shown in the video) was about how to address the centuries of anti-Semitism. If you say it was wrong, you’re saying great theologians throughout history, including possibly John the Apostle, were wrong, which leads to the question of what else they were wrong about. If you say it was right, then you are anti-Semitic. If you try to ignore the dilemma, it won’t go away.

When I have asked people questions about slavery or hell directly I have received a spectrum of answers, from being given books that describe the reasoning of the people in those times to blatant lies about what the Bible actually says. When I speak of those responses in general to others, I’m told I’m going to the wrong church, and that if I went to their favorite church, I’d get the right response. This is the run around on a grand scale.

To keep chasing the rabbit down this hole, I have to show up on Sunday to some new church, show I’m sincere, put money in the basket, get a meeting with the pastor, take an Adult Sunday School class, read the material, ask a specific question, and get one of those responses from the spectrum I mentioned above. If I ask enough of those questions, and continue to express dissatisfaction with the answers, I’m told that maybe religion is not right for me. Actually, in most cases I’ve figured that out for myself. Rarely do I need to be asked to leave.

What Tony is saying is, it’s time religion put that burden of asking questions on itself. He addresses specifically people who write about religion, I’m saying all churches and all religious people should be doing this. I should be able to walk into a church or have an open discussion with any religious person and ask a straightforward question about their stand on homosexuality, treatment of women, relationship with Jews and Muslims, slavery, smiting, or genocide, and I should get a straightforward answer. They don’t need to know every Bible verse, but if I show them one that disagrees with their views, they should agree it’s wrong, or the burden is on them to explain it.

Some people, when confronted with verses like these will tell you some abhorrent behavior is okay if God says so. Take the one about beating your slaves, some people have told me that they think slavery should be legal. More often people say something more generic about believing in the Word and not being open to argument about it. I don’t respect their logic or their conclusion, but I respect them for being clear and firm about their stand. I respect them more than the person who tries to make excuses for God’s behavior or starts out making a logical argument but then switches to a faith statement when their logic fails.

I could make an extensive list, but try a few for yourself. Think about what your view of morality is, how the world should work, then look at these Bible passages.

Exodus 21:20

20 If a man strikes his male or female servant with a stick and he or she dies as a direct result, the master must be punished. 21 But if the servant survives a day or two, the master is not to be punished because the servant is his property.

There is a beautiful passage in 1 Kings, chapter 19. You've probably heard it, the one about the still small voice of God. But the standard lectionary ends at verse 15, because at that point, God instructs Isaiah to build an army. In the pages that follow, those armies follow what God tells them to do here:

15 The Lord replied to him, “Go! Return to Damascus, and when you get there, anoint Hazael as king over Aram, 16 anoint Nimshi’s son Jehu as king over Israel, and anoint Shaphat’s son Elisha from Abel-meholah as a prophet to replace you. 17 Whoever escapes from Hazael’s sword Jehu will execute, and whoever escapes from Jehu’s sword Elisha will put to death. 18 Nevertheless, I’ve reserved 7,000 in Israel who have neither bowed their knees to Baal nor kissed him.”

This is from a parable in Matthew 3. You tell me what's going on here:

11 “I baptize you with[b] water for repentance. But after me comes one who is more powerful than I, whose sandals I am not worthy to carry. He will baptize you with[c] the Holy Spirit and fire. 12 His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor, gathering his wheat into the barn and burning up the chaff with unquenchable fire.”

Or this one. What the?

2 Kings 6:29

So we boiled my son, and did eat him: and I said to her on the next day, Give your son, that we may eat him: and she has hid her son.

Not really a soda

I bought this at the Whole Foods Co-op in Duluth. That's not part of the chain, they had the name before Whole Foods got to be a big corporation. I tried an original flavor Kombucha before and couldn't finish it. It's sort of like a mushroom shake, with some sawdust added. This was basically the same, with some orange flavor attempting to mask it. You don't see these outside of co-ops much. You really have to be dedicated, or into some sort of sacrifice to get your nutrition this way. It's actually live, some sort of organism. I don't really want to know anymore. It doesn't really qualify as a micro-soda anyway. I just posted this as a public service, not really part of my craft soda series.

How to read the Bible

John Dominic Crossan came up to my little corner of the world this week. He is a highly respected theologian, and for good reason. He is also quite entertaining and his presentation is enhanced by his diminutive stature and Irish accent. And the lecture was free. If you ever have an opportunity like that, take it. He is a founding member of something called the Jesus Seminar, a primary source of material for liberal Christians.

In this instance, he was selling his new book, “How to Read the Bible and Still be a Christian”. This interested me because reading the Bible is exactly what made me an atheist. Also, reading one of his earlier books got me into the church for 17 years. That was “Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time”. In both of these books, he lays out the contradictions of the New Testament and speaks to why they are there. In this recent lecture, he goes further than I've ever heard him go before into problems with the Vatican now and how the message of Jesus was corrupted and altered from the very beginning.

The core of his message is that Jesus and his early followers were non-violent protesters who sought peace through the means of justice. The parallel system at the time, being attempted by the Romans, was peace through victory, using violence. Crossan begins the lecture with some ancient Roman writings speaking of Caesar using much the same language as that used for Jesus, as in “Son of God”, stuff like that. The question for us today is to look at both of those writings and choose which is the better path.

I'm with him to a point with this, but when he says “choose”, he is saying to choose who's claim about being God is true. In this lecture at least, he didn't consider the option that both are wrong. He was more than willing to show evidence that humans changed the words and intentions of Jesus, and not 1,500 years later when Martin Luther said we should read the Bible as the word of God, but immediately, in the book of Matthew. It's blatant cherry picking, but he has so much scholarly knowledge about who did the twisting, how the parables compare, the translation of the words, the dates the redacting occurred, the political reason for the redacting, and on and on, that anyone who would dare attempt to argue with him would be drowned out by such detail.

After the talk, he took questions. I asked about the “still believing” part, because it didn't seem that he really covered that. He said it was a choice, it was a commitment and said it several more times using slightly different words. I felt that the length of his reply showed he knew his answer was lacking in some way. He also relied heavily on his analysis of human culture since the Neolithic period.

He claims that for the last 10,000 years, people have grown steadily more violent. The symbolism of the farmer Cain killing the herder Abel and then building the first city is also significant to this narrative, but how that kind of life is somehow less peaceful than the hunter-gatherer life is not clear. Anyway, he asks us to look at this increased violence, then look at the non-violent Jesus movement and choose what we are committed to. Why I can't choose non-violent Buddhism, I don't know. Why I can't choose the non-violent protests of Occupy Wall Street and choose no god and no church, I don't know.

This is typical for a modern Christian theologians. They can talk all day about flood stories coming from Mesopotamia and how the early Israelites had to incorporate that story and add a rainbow at the end. They are more than happy to find that a letter from Paul they don't like was not written by the same Paul that appears earlier in the New Testament. They won't bother much with how God and man were one in Jesus, and instead focus on the message. And when they're done, they say, "oh yeah, and God's real". I don't understand how he hangs on to that. One of his fellow members of the Jesus Seminar, Robert Price, could not. So we can see two people, equal in scholarly knowledge making different choices.

To me what it came down to is he was asking me to choose between my faith in my fellow humans or faith in the story of a failed non-violent protest that occurred 2,000 years ago. And somehow God fits in there too. What I really meant to be asking was, why does he think the movement failed? Clearly he believes the message of the original stories were severely corrupted. He can no doubt go into great detail about how that corruption happened and the forces at play that ended with Jesus on the cross. And he can see the beauty in living up to the call for non-violence to the point of accepting the verdict and paying the ultimate price. None of that helps me believe anything divine was at work during any of this, no matter what form it actually took back then.

I don't fault him for bringing a new and modern message to Christians who have been handed a corrupted message for generations. A message that has increased in the level of corruption in the last 100 years as it has tried to deal with modern science and philosophy. People who can show a lifetime of commitment to the gospels and a deep love for the tradition can reach far more listeners than I can. But as long as they continue to say that despite all the historical knowledge, they still believe in something that can't be documented, something magical that we are somehow missing today, then they are part of the problem. It's why the movement failed then and why we still have problems discussing religion today.

This lecture, though disappointing, serves as a bookend to my journey of the last 20 years. He said he came to Duluth exactly 20 years ago, and I'm pretty sure that would have been when I first saw him speak at United Theological Seminary in the Twin Cities. At that time, things were much worse in Ireland, and he drew parallels of the evil empire of Rome and the occupying force of Britain. He didn't use the words himself, but one of the people who asked a question afterward said, “so, if I'm hearing you right, we are the Romans”. John Dominic smiled and bounced up on his toes like a leprechaun and said, “mmm, hmm”.

It is a message we need to get. Christians today aren't the oppressed minority crying out in the wilderness. They certainly have nothing in common with the slaves in Egypt. They often talk like they are, all the while filling their mega-church parking lots with gas guzzling cars that have enough food tucked in their seat cushions to make an actual oppressed minority in the wilderness salivate. But what Crossan is telling them, actually more like hoping they will get it, is they are the ones who are enforcing a peace through violence. Rome co-opted their little community of house churches a long time ago and put the Christian God in charge of anointing Kings and blessing armies. They kept the part about peace, but managed to twist the part about how it is best achieved. They sold them on the lie that they would do just a little bit of violence, in God's name, then it would be better.

Crossan brings a great message, and one I'm all for. If we don't get it, we are doomed to repeat the history of Rome. But I don't think that message will ever be fully transmitted until you say all of the message comes from people. As long as you hold out that somewhere in there is a force that can only be found through faith, you'll never untangle human corruption from the message of love. The problem is, it's all corruption. We all want to love everybody, but as soon as we start thinking about how we're going to do that, we start compromising. As soon as we start compromising, we start feeling guilty. After that, each of takes off in a different direction trying to deal with those feelings, whether it be by eating chocolate, doing yoga or having a string of meaningless relationships.

For some, the way to deal with it is to confess those personal faults once a week and get together with others and sing familiar songs. And there's nothing wrong with surrounding yourself with people who love you despite your shortcomings, with finding people who can listen to your troubles, who can watch you fail and still support you and still believe in you. Religion does not have the corner on the market for that type of community. It also helps to have people around you who will challenge you, who won't let you sink into a pit of despair no matter how many times you've screwed up. That's something a good church leader does. It's also something any good leader does. It's something bad leaders don't do, and there are plenty of bad church leaders. 

Crossan doesn't deal with why the movement failed because he doesn't want to see it as a failure. He says he sees a heartbeat in the Bible, of a coming together as a community, then being corrupted by power and falling apart, over and over. Well, of course he does, because that's been happening since before recorded history. The Bible chronicles some of the times that happened to certain people who carried a tradition with them through success and failure, even through exile and slavery. It's pretty cool. That doesn't inform us at all about their god actually existing.

There may have been times when bonding over their belief in that god helped them. Since before Jesus, there has been plenty of disagreement about that god. It really just got worse after the first century. When Christianity combined with Rome and became the sole purveyor of power in Europe, I can see why some who didn't believe in that power clung to it anyway. They wanted to eat and live near what they called home. Increasingly today, there are fewer excuses for continuing to choose to cling those beliefs.

As I often say at the end of my blogs, all we have is each other. This isn't an exact quote, but John Dominic Crossan basically agreed with me during this talk when he said church isn't a place, it's wherever we gather. Of course he would say that once we get together God appears.  Sorry Dom, that's creating disagreement where none is necessary.

Why the religion debate must be settled

The reason we have a battle going on today between fundamentalists and mainstream religion, is the question of who God is was never settled. This is true in most religions, but it is most obvious in Christianity. Fundamentalists have taken advantage of ignorance to win the debate for the last 1,700 years. The consequences of them winning again are much bigger than they have ever been.

We know the name St. Augustine because he defeated his adversary in debate and gained the favors of the Roman Empire and they proceeded to destroy anyone who disagreed with their theology. They burned their writings, their churches and sometimes the people.

We know the name Martin Luther and we have Lutheran churches because he supported the edicts written a thousand years before him that said we are born sinners and must pay the church to get us into heaven. Today, we know the names Rick Warren, Billy Graham and Ted Cruz.

Augustine and Luther had the advantage of a mostly illiterate populous. Today’s leaders don’t unless we deliberately look away. Augustine and Luther could say they understood the will of God. We can figure that out for ourselves. Augustine and Luther had armies to promote their philosophies. We absolutely cannot allow that to happen this time.

The reason we don’t know as much about the losers of these debates, is, they lost. The winners picked the books that went into the Bible and translated it. For a long time they read it to us like children. Once the dust settled of the fall of the Roman Empire, the story changed from being an argument to a story of how the church fathers had friendly theological discussions and reconciled the differences between Peter and Paul and figured out what Jesus really meant when he first told his disciples to gather swords then later to put them away.

What’s funny is, most people today are much closer to being Pelagianist than they are to being Augustianist. Most people would agree with the writings of Erasmus over Luther, even though beyond the Erasmus B. Dragon joke, they aren’t familiar with the name. The problem is, when you try to read these things, you find their reasons for believing man does or does not have the will to choose a good action over an evil one is rooted in something Adam did or something King David said or how God entered the world through Jesus or all sorts of theological rhetoric.

It’s not too hard to find discussions of Augustine vs Pelagius that are written from the fundamentalist Lutheran or Evangelical point of view. They often end like this one, saying,

“Eventually the Council of Carthage (417) condemned Pelagianism. Sadly, this was not the end of it. A concept of semi-Pelagianism surfaced and was addressed in the Synod of Arles (around 473) and the Council of Orange in 529. On occasion, the ideas of the Pelagians and Semi-Pelagians still surface today.”

  

I think the reason you don’t find mainstream discussions of this is, that’s not how modern people think. Modern people don’t care about what two people in funny hats argued about 1,700 years ago. They don’t feel at all affected by a conversation between Eve and a snake. Erasmus and Ficino and Pico della Mirandola and other early Christian humanist writers referred to Jesus because that was the philosophy of the day. That was what you learned if you went to University.

Today, we have a wealth of philosophies to draw on. We (and I’m talking about people who live in free countries here) have the ability to evaluate many religions as well as secular philosophies and not lose our jobs or get our heads removed. We don’t do what Augustine did and simply look at babies who fight over food and decide original sin is real, we notice how they aren’t prejudice until we teach them, we ask them to solve problems of unfairness and see that they do it by sharing, we also look to nature and see caring and cooperation in our animal cousins. Love is everywhere and it is good, we’ve figured that out.

Most modern people who go to church don’t want to engage in theological debate because they don’t see a position there worth defending. And they are right. Unfortunately, that gets misunderstood to mean that Pelagius and Erasmus were wrong to say that human dignity is more important than practicing a certain ritual a certain way. The idea of loving your enemy was profoundly expressed by a community in the first century. Erasmus said God gave them the will to choose to do that but ultimately it is human nature to do good. Augustine said they had no choice, it was grace. Why they thought that doesn’t really matter. We have much better reasons today for putting the needs of a single mother above the need to have a consistent doctrine that connects our desire to care to the words of an author from a dead language.

Liberals lose debates with fundamentalists because they don’t play the fundamentalist's game. Both sides walk away feeling they’ve made good points because neither side is listening. Large churches have to accommodate both, or they won’t be large churches. That’s why I say, if you go to church this Easter, and you don’t agree with everything the preacher says, don’t put money in the basket. We treat every other speaker in the world like that. If we don’t like them, we don’t buy their books or pay to hear them speak. Why do we give churches a pass? If you feel that there is something wrong with what your church is doing, speak up. If you don’t, this civilization will go the way of Rome and the way of the European feudal system.