Lots of Thoughts and Ten Pastoral Suggestions on Postmodern Interpretation of Scripture

            Once upon a time—long before modernism or postmodernism, long before even the Renaissance or the Enlightenment, the world was a very different place than it is now. People – including theologians and preachers—just didn’t think the way they do now.

            So, for example, when they had to write a creed that all of them could agree on, the underlying philosophy of the creed was based on a long Greek tradition of substance theology—on the theory that all that is divine, and all that is material, has to be made out of something. It was this substance, according to the creeds, that can’t be confounded or confused. Today you will be hard pressed to find any scholar, Christian or not, who has any use for such “pagan” philosophical presuppositions (with apologies, of course, to the Thomists among us). And yet, for most Christians today, these documents still define how the three persons of the Trinity can be one God, and how the one person of Jesus can have two natures.

            Or again, there was Saint Augustine, the Bishop of Hippo, and a great hero to both Martin Luther and John Calvin. He was a scholar in the old mold, too—a thorough-going Platonist with Manichean prejudices. Augustine was a dualist who believed in the Platonic myth of the superiority of soul to body. And Augustine was sure that Plato learned much of what he later wrote after visiting with Jeremiah, in Egypt.

            In his magisterial but idiosyncratic book on Biblical interpretation and preaching, On Christian Doctrine, Saint Augustine commends to us the seven laws for interpretation as handed down by Tychonius the Donatist. For example, Augustine explains a rule described as “Of the Lord and His Body.” According to this interpretive rule, people in the Bible sometimes should be understood to symbolize both Christ and his church. So when scripture speaks of a bride adorned with jewels, even though only a single person is mentioned, the bride must refer to the church, and the jewels that adorn the head, to Jesus. If you are not sure that this interpretive rule is really helpful, and if you therefore have some issues with Augustine’s hermeneutic, you are in good company.

            I raise these three cases: the creedal dependence on Greek notions of substance, Augustine’s Platonism, and Augustine’s affirmation of Tychonius’s allegorical hermeneutic to make a point before I wade in with some criticism of both modernist and postmodernist approaches to scriptural interpretation. The Christian church has a long history of orthodoxy that predates today’s modernist notions of what orthodoxy must be. The point to keep in mind, then, is that no human intellectual movement—premodern, modern, or postmodern—likely has a corner on the truth.

            During the premodern era, before Saint Thomas Aquinas’s Aristotle delivered us of Augustine’s Plato, Christian life was very different. However, that first thousand years of the church’s history was also incredibly successful. The church spread from Jerusalem to Antioch to Rome, and even as far as India, China, and Siberia.

            At the same time, the vast majority of Christians could not read or write. So, even as priests and academicians and politicians wrestled with what scripture taught about a host of difficult matters, most Christians had an extremely simple faith. It had to be, because Christians only knew of Jesus what they could remember. Most made do without the doctrines of atonement, sanctification, inspiration, or election. People only knew the best of the stories their priests told them, or the moral lessons traveling bands of actors taught them, or the passion plays acted out before Stations of the Cross. Ancient Christians depended on paintings, music, relics, sculptures and windows to remember the old, old story.

            Before modernism, most Christians believed because the church told them to. Doubt is an intellectual project few could imagine. One didn’t discuss doctrine, but merely gave assent to the few one learned about from the pulpit. It was the rare Christian who had ever heard of Armageddon, or a personal relationship with Jesus, or predestination.

            But again—this church—one we now have a hard time valuing, because it was so alien to our modern ways—this ancient, odd church thrived before modernity. Oh, sure, there were excesses and weaknesses. Clergy sometimes preyed on the vulnerable, church leaders often became rich, and the church and secular politicians were often in bed together (or maybe, some things never change).

            When modernism took hold of the European mind, modernism forever changed that ancient form of Christianity—sometimes for the worse, but not always. Still, before I get to modernism, I want to reiterate that the premodern church of these “ignorant” peasants, of these bumbling church leaders, this premodern church was historical proof against any claim that orthodoxy needs modernism.

            In any case, scholars offer many, sometimes conflicting, accounts for the triumph of modernism. I’ve already mentioned one, the effect of Europe’s rediscovery, largely on account of the work of Saint Aquinas, of Aristotelian rationality. On a popular level, the rise of modernism was, at the very least, bolstered and encouraged by another development—a key development for us Christians, who are people of the Word. I’m speaking of the invention of the printing press. Over the space of one or two hundred years, most Europeans became literate as books and pamphlets proliferated. They fell in love with the current ideas—Aristotelian—ideas about rhetoric, about persuasion, about power, about rationality, and about what humans are all about. Science, in particular, flourished—and human ability to do good, and evil, with technological flourish, multiplied.

            Over time, this modernistic seed inspired most of the great philosophies and movements of the past several hundred years: from Scottish Common Sense Realism to Communism and from Reformation to the “God is Dead” meme. Modernism is so big that it is difficult to define, so confident that its one word slogan might be “progress,” so triumphant that it is difficult to see any competition, and so pervasive that, like fish in water, we hardly realize anymore that it surrounds us all the time.

            Still, a hundred word summary is called for. Modernism insists that the right combination of reason, objectivity and Western colonial or military intervention will inevitably lead to human progress on all fronts. Modernist Biblical hermeneutics presumes that as long as you apply the right grammatical and historical—that is, “scientific” or “rational” instruments, ancient texts will reveal authorial intention. Modernists suppose that most scholars can be objective, and that people have always been pretty much the same. That means that even if the horizon between the ancient text and the modern interpreter is huge—say 2,500 years—human nature being constant, we can make the jump.

            Brian Walsh and Richard Middleton, writing in Truth is Stranger than it Used to Be (IVP) suggest that a nice symbol for modernity might be the Tower of Babel. The builders said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens and let us make a name for ourselves, otherwise we shall be scattered over the whole earth” (Gen. 11:4). According to Walsh and Middleton, modernity believes that there is only one way—the scientific method—to guarantee progress and joy and peace for one world and one humanity recreated in the image of North America and Europe. This culture of progress is built on the foundation of rationality, rises from the earth on walls of technology, and is crowned with the jewels of a one-world market economy. Modernity is an exercise in humanist pride.

            Ironically, biblical scholars—whether of the most liberal or the most conservative type it matters not—have generally adopted these sorts of modernistic presuppositions to scriptural studies. Among liberal Christians, this has led to the treatment of scripture as a history source book rather than the revelation of God, who cannot be known by science, in any case—a problem with theology that the likes of Kant and Schleiermacher struggled whole life times to figure out. Liberal theologians focus on ethics, on the psychology of religion, and on the history of scripture and the veracity of its stories—the search for the historical Jesus, for example.

            But, according to the evangelical scholar Hendrik Hart, “To counteract the rational infallibility of scientific propositions, [conservative] Christians responded with the (equally rational) infallibility of revealed propositions. But a focus on [rationalistic] propositions was common to both sides” (Setting Our Sights By the Morning Star, 95). Thus Haddon Robinson, for example, argues that “expository preaching is the communication of a biblical concept, derived from and transmitted through a historical grammatical, and literary study of a passage in its context, which the Holy Spirit first applies to the personality and experience of the preacher, then through him to his hearers” (Biblical Preaching, 21). The same emphasis on truth, the same emphasis on method, on rational propositions, and interestingly enough, on experience, or psychology that characterizes modernity characterizes most of contemporary, Western Christianity. Where this is a conflict between the two, conservative Christians, using modernist-looking methods, create their own private parallel worlds—everything from Creation Science instead of evolution, Theophostic Therapy instead of EMDR, Premillenial Prophecy instead of Futurists, and Christian Contemporary music instead of just plain good music. 

            But more should be said of modernity. Modernity has given us freedom of movement compliments of Honda and Boeing, but also so much pollution that our oceans are dying, people in cities like Manila are choking, and skyrocketing skin cancer. Modernity has given us modern medicine, but also WWI’s mustard gas and WWII’s first use of atomic weapons by the United States, and now military drones unleashed not against mere military targets, as Augustine’s premodern just war theory would require, but mostly civilian targets as the exigencies of pragmatism ruled. Modernism has given us great cities but also British concentration camps in the Boer War, as well as even more terrible Japanese and German concentration camps in WWII. Modernism has given us the bureaucratic efficiency that has allowed me to put together a family history based on Dutch records conveniently put on line; but also efficient holocausts of Jews, Serbs, Croats, and Cambodians. Modernity, to put it bluntly, has failed.

           

            Many years ago, I visited Rwanda. I saw bodies left to rot in a church, only hair and rags clinging to their skeletons. Their pastor betrayed these people when they sought refuge in the church, as one tribe of Rwandans mercilessly tried to kill all members of another. In Bissaro, Rwanda, I saw a mountain made up of the bones of 50,000 murdered Rwandans. The genocide was encouraged via speeches broadcast on the radio, it was carried out with the help of guns and knives forged in modern factories. Rwanda’s conservative Christians—more than 90% of the population—gleefully participated in the carnage, often with the encouragement of conservative, Western educated pastors who knew all about hermeneutics and objectivity and atonement theory. What is more, the tribal animosity that sparked the genocide was largely the result of Belgian racism and exploitation. 150 years ago, the Belgian colonial conquerors set one Rwandan tribe against the other by favoring the Tutsi tribe over the Hutu tribe. You see, the Belgians thought the Tutsis looked more European, and so they thought the Tutsis could more easily learn new European methods of colonial management and oversight. Another gift of modernity. Those same pastors are now, in countries like Uganda, encouraging their parishioners to believe that gay people should be imprisoned, or killed.

            After Rwanda, I will never be the same again. I agree with Hendrik Hart, who says that, “The overriding concern of our times is not so much to understand right doctrine as it is to find our way. Our concerns are more pastoral than theological” (Hart, p. 13).

            Enter the postmoderns. They are united by a deep and abiding suspicion of the secular humanist premises of modernity. How they deal with that suspicion differs, from one postmodernist to another—just as moderns differ in their affiliations to Marxist or Freudian or Democratic or Republican visions of how rationality can deliver on progress. Still, there are some presuppositional themes common to postmodernity.

            First, rather than faith in reason, postmoderns are suspicion of the ways reason and its stepchildren—science and technology—has been used to oppress, to trick, and to rationalize on behalf of the powerful. I’m reminded, once more, of Plato and Aristotle. Both recognized the power of words to persuade people. But where Aristotle the modernist hero worried little about how rhetoric might be used for good or ill, and merely explored its power, Plato—premodern Augustine’s hero—constantly fretted about how rhetoric could be used for bad ends. Postmoderns recommend intuition, faith, passion, experience, and love as better guides to action than reason.

            Note that postmoderns do not deny reason’s power to create new things, discover new cures, or for that matter, develop new weapons. It is just that Postmoderns suspect that reason is mostly used by governments and corporations and texts to enslave rather than liberate, to deceive rather than illuminate, and to invite surrender rather than empower—as Aristotle’s rhetoric would be.

           

            Second, rather than faith in human progress, postmoderns mourn human loss, suffering, and inequity. They are concerned for the weak, the minorities, the hurting; they groan, with all creation, over what progress has meant for the environment, for ocean life, for city life, and for warfare. They resonate with Christians and Marxists and environmentalists—just about anyone who is willing to put principal ahead of profit when it comes to social justice, people, and the earth.

            Third, rather than trust in methodologically secured objectivity, postmoderns believe that all data, all texts, and all of creation is value laden. We usually see what we want to see, what our prejudices have taught us to notice, what our pocket books think will be profitable—we see whatever will keep the status quo on our side of the table. Postmoderns deny that there are scientific methods of exegesis that can guarantee a true reading of scripture. They point to the Christian failure to agree on matters such as the role of women, baptism, the relative importance of charismatic gifts as evidence that not even the a rationalistic, rule-bound hermeneutic can guarantee people will agree on key doctrines. So postmodern Christians want a new hermeneutic, one that focuses on the poor, the widow and the least of these; one that challenges the status quo, the rich, and the powerful that the old hermeneutic usually figured out how to excuse.

            Rather than submit to the powers, to the rational bureaucracies, to parties or corporations or denominations—all rationally and scientifically conceived to keep people in line, postmoderns tend to be very suspicious of human institutions and the power the wield. They think of Vietnam War and Fundamentalist Islam and Communist China and of cover-ups of sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic and other churches when people try to defend institutions. Instead, postmoderns are preoccupied with self—self-discovery, self-empowerment, self-fulfillment.

            But finally—why does this all matter? How, in view of the face-off between modernism and postmodernism—against the backdrop of premodern Christianity, might this matter for preachers? I have ten pastoral suggestions.

·      First, something about the interpreter. Postmodernity has made a forceful case for pointing out that every interpretation, every observation, every reading of the text is inseparable from the interpreter’s personal prejudices, priorities, and philosophical presuppositions. Ultimately, you can’t hide behind the grammatical-historical method, or the best commentaries, or how you were raised, or what you think must be the plain sense of the text. If you try to do so, you’ll just be kidding yourself. And there is nothing so dangerous on the pulpit as a pastor just kidding himself. Postmodernity is a movement that takes seriously something that we Protestants have confessed for a long time—that as much as the image of God and his grace resides in great measure in many of us, we all struggle with sin and prejudice and stupidity too. What we need is a lot more humility about our interpretative skills.

·      Second, something about the author. According to the most postmoderns, people like Roland Barthes and Paul de Man, the author is always dead to the interpreter. Little to nothing can be known of the intentions of writers because words are slippery when it comes to passing along meaning, motives, and are always prone to misunderstanding. I think we need to be humble about what we can know of authorial intention in light of these assertions

·      Third, something about the audience. Never forget that sermons are for audiences often reeling under the blows of modernity—people who have been downsized out of work, people who have asthma or bronchitis on account of the pollution, and people who have experienced—or engage in—violence of every kind, people who feel like a number, or a bar code, or dehumanized by the system. Remember that for modern audiences, the message of gospel is basically simple. Jesus loves them, embraces them, and wants to use them in his world to make it a better, more loving, more heavenly place.

·      Fourth, modernist science insists that the data can mean only one thing. The church doesn’t insist, however, that a text can mean only one thing. Long ago Augustine pointed out that any interpretation of scripture that accords with scripture’s central message is appropriate. “Whoever finds a lesson [in scripture] useful to the building of charity, even though he has not said what the author may be shown to have intended in that place, has not been deceived, nor is he lying in any way” (I:36). Postmodernity never totally rejects traditional hermeneutics. It does, however, insist that restricting ourselves to a single, literal interpretation based on what the author meant limits our understanding of the endless depth of scripture. Of such literalism, Saint Augustine wrote, “There is a miserable servitude of the spirit in [the] habit of taking signs for things, so that one is not able to raise the eye of the mind above things that are corporal and created to drink in eternal light” (III:9). Let’s not get hung up with finding the one true interpretation for any one text; let’s enjoy the multiplicity of meanings in scripture that are consistent with the heart of God revealed throughout scripture—lets learn from the premodern saints in our tradition and let’s use some postmodern interpretive techniques like intertextuality and strong readings as heuristic means for multiplying interpretations, and thus our depth of understanding, into scripture.

·      Fifth. Let’s learn from postmodern advocacy for God’s favorites, the poor. I suspect that pastors who work in inner cities or with marginalized communities will resonate more with postmodern concern for the poor than with the modernist concern for maintaining the prerogatives of our great institutions and programs—like free trade and free markets—that most obviously benefit the middle class and rich in the most powerful nations on earth.

·      Sixth. Let’s focus on orthopraxis—especially when it comes to love—rather than orthodoxy. The orthodoxy I've been talking about to this point is a mirage, homage paid to a "true," meaning that always recedes the sharper we hone our rationalistic, interpretive tools. Church institutions, in particular, need to engage in social justice, in advocacy, and in love of neighbour - orthopraxis rather than orthodoxy. My favorite book on this topic is actually a study of Christian orthopraxis in the premodern era—Gerhard Lohfink’s Jesus and Community.

·      Seventh. The best way to preserve the gifts of modernity is to make sure that literacy belongs not only to those with power but to the people. Beware of how television and the Internet and poverty and poor schools rob people of the analytical tools then need to take on the principalities and powers. Remember that ultimately, in both literate and in illiterate societies, it is the highly literate who are inordinately represented among the rulers and among the prophetic fringe. As people of the Word, having once received the gift of literacy, we should not turn our back on it now, like most are in the habit of doing.

·      Eighth. Postmodern readings of scripture will always need to consider the church’s traditional interpretations and exhibit a deep respect for authorial intention. But postmodern readings are also a way of looking at texts in new ways, revealing new things, encouraging new prophecies, dreams, and visions. Scripture is full of play, reversal, laughter, irony, as well as darkness, fear, oppression and reversal. From Abraham and Sarah—two old crones who should have been looking for grave plots to buy but had to settle on a baby crib instead; to Moses who was chosen to speak a liberating word on behalf of the Israelites to Pharaoh—even though he had a speech impediment; to the righteousness of Tamar, who played the harlot . . . scripture should not be boxed in by our insistence that it play by our rationalist rules.

·      Ninth. So try on some postmodern readings and question modernism’s notion that it is the only kid on the block.

·      Tenth. And play. The right attitude to interpretation is that interpretation is a playground, not an exam. Have fun, and if you trip and fall, count on someone bigger and wiser to pick you up, dust you off, give you a hug, and send you back for more fun. 

What Is God Actually Saying to You?

“What is God actually saying to you?”

When I read that question in a blog (http://tinyurl.com/bs85vws) by Ben Sternke recently, I thought it must be a trick question. We all know, after all, that the Bible is God’s “Word.” So if we want to know what God is actually saying—as compared to what we wish God was saying or what people would like God to be saying—well, then we probably should read the Bible.

Now, I know that not everyone agrees on how, exactly, the Bible is God’s Word, or what it actually means. Good people in different faith traditions have different ideas. A Fundamentalist Christian will probably say that the Bible is God’s inerrant, all-but-dictated-from-heaven exact Word. A mainline Christian in the Barthian tradition might say the Bible mysteriously becomes God’s Word when God decides it will. There are many more possibilities. In general, however, they share the view that the Bible is, in some manner, God’s Word.

So I think that if we want to know what God is actually saying, we should read the Bible.

What God is actually saying in the Bible is complicated, of course. For many of us, reading the Bible is just plain boring. We can’t attend to it very long. But beyond the trouble we have reading, the Bible is hard to interpret, too. It was written thousands of years ago, in a different language, by people who didn’t have phones or bikinis or even sewers. It is almost as if the Bible comes at us from a different universe. I find it remarkable that, once translated, most of us get its central themes. Still, interpreting what God actually says in the Bible is hard. Maybe that is the least we can expect from a God that some of our theological heroes have described as ineffable, transcendent, and incomprehensible.

There is another class of difficulties we all struggle with when we read the Bible for what God is actually saying. These are very personal and sensitive. But the truth is, we all tend to read into the Bible what we want to hear: that it is for gays or against them, that it insists on silence for women or inspires them to be preachers, that God is against all violence or selectively in favor of some violence. We’ve all been raised in communities that shape how we read the Bible. None of us come to it without presuppositions or prejudices that influence what we hear. Our hearts have scary, devious, cavernous depths that shape what we think (and even what we hear).

But still, as hard as it is to overcome these personal biases, when someone asks me what God is actually saying, I respond with, “well, here’s the Bible. It is God’s Word.”

Anyway, I saw this blog, recently, and its title was, “What Is God Actually Saying to You?” by Ben Sternke. I thought it had to be a trick question because all Christians know that in some manner, shape, or form, the Bible is God’s Word.

But no. Sternke writes that if you want to hear God’s Word, you need to engage in a nine-step process of observation, reflection and discussion. You must pause and quiet your heart and slow down your body. You need to pray and spend a minute simply listening. You should imagine what Jesus would say if he had an arm around you. You need to write down phrases and words that you see. You need to feel that God has spoken to you. You need to check it out with others. That’s what God is actually saying. And then you need to respond with an action.

But not a word in this blog about the Word.

Excuse my rant, but this is really dangerous stuff. God routinized. Here God is subject to our administrative and procedural initiatives in order to achieve our own wishful ends. But worst of all, God saying whatever we think we hear God saying—which is probably what we wish he or she was saying. A hermeneutic of “I feel,” and “my gut tells me,” rather than one of study, and exegesis, and comparing scripture to scripture, and checking what other wise Christians over the past 2000 years have said about this or that text. A method for hearing God that is perfectly aligned with the relativistic and individualistic religious longings of twentieth-century America. A subjective and self-centered approach to truth by people blissfully unaware that such an approach  is even possible. God’s Word determined by the vagaries and whims of my all too often unruly unconscious. An exchange of the Word in scripture for a few words imagined in the course of a little sit-down meditation. A recipe for churning out people so sure that they know what God is saying privately to them that they stop listening to the hard things he actually says in the Bible.

Of course, I’m pretty sure Sternke probably values the Bible highly. And I know that he thinks it wise to check with others to “see if they have anything to add.” I also understand that the notion that we can personally hear God has popped up over and over in Christianity, in people as diverse as Montanus (and Prisca and Maximilla) to Joseph Smith to some modern Pentecostals. Sternke will surely say that I’ve missed his own larger context (which I know nothing about) and put his blog in the worst possible light.

Maybe so. But hearing what God is actually saying in the Bible is hard enough without giving people the idea that they can hear God on their own, at will, according to a schedule that suits them, with a little disciplined attentiveness. It isn’t that I’m against meditation or slowing down or reflection—it is just that I prefer to meditate on the Word of God rather than meditate on purportedly divine words from beyond the ether.

The Bible Becomes the Word

When I was a little boy, I lost my shoelaces. Regularly.

I wore desert boots back then—gray suede shoes that got their name from their color, I guess. In spite of their name, desert boots were actually very cool. And fashion being what it is, you can bet that one day soon they will be cool again.

Desert boots had only three rows of shoelace eyelets. The shoelaces were round and short and hard to tie. That was a problem for me because I had fine motor deficiencies as a kid. Nothing serious, but it meant I couldn’t hit the ball, catch it very often, and write or print neatly. And I couldn’t tie a nice bowknot either—especially with the short, round laces of my desert boots. Unfortunately, because the boots were cut too high to slip in and out of without retying, I couldn’t resort to granny knots either. I had to use a regular bowknot. That meant that my laces kept coming undone and, often, that I lost my laces altogether.

My mother, who was in almost every respect longsuffering and patient, finally lost patience with me on this score. She warned me not to lose any more laces—or else. Or else what? Or else I’d have to retrace my steps from home to the bus stop until I found my missing laces. Given that I had probably lost my laces at school and could probably never retrace my meandering route I took from the bus stop to home anyhow, the command to find the laces was about as hopeless a command as any a parent has ever given a child. Still, what could I do? Mom commanded, and so instead of watching “Leave It to Beaver,” I searched in vain for shoelaces.

But somehow, between those searches, I also learned to tie my shoes. Smart mom. She knew what she was doing.

I was reminded of that story while writing this week’s sermon. Isn’t that how it is with Scripture too? We search Scripture because we’re looking for something we’re pretty sure has to be there. And we search scripture because we’re told to do it by pastors, parents, and friends.

And then, somehow, even when we don’t find the specific thing we’re looking for, something wonderful may find us. Good news. The Bible becomes the Word.

A New New Testament

Hidden away on the back pages of many newspapers this past month was a story about a new book entitled A New New Testament by Robert Tausig. Tausig and a team of scholars compiled a ten ancient religious gospels and epistles written in the early days of Christianity that offer an alternative perspective than the one found in the Bible. Reading these texts, says Tausig, will give you a fuller idea of the religious milieu in which Christianity was founded. These texts, which the church ultimately decided should not be part of the New Testament, have names like “The Gospel of Thomas,” and “The Acts of Paul and Thecla.”

The publication of A New New Testament is controversial with some Christians because of the implicit suggestion that the New Testament is incomplete. I don’t think that is what Tausig and his scholars are really saying. These additional ten texts do, however, shed a lot of light on the competing movements and opinions that existed in and around the early church. So they make for interesting reading.

These texts—and there are many, many more that might have been chosen—are often called gnostic gospels. Gnosticism wasn’t the same as Christianity, but was heavily influenced by it. What I find most interesting about Gnosticism is not how it is similar to Christianity, but how it was different. It is a difference that illuminates.

Gnostics were very spiritual people. In fact, they were pretty sure that all things spiritual were really great, especially compared to all things material—including human bodies. Gnostics thought that the body’s feelings and passions prevented people from thinking holy, spiritual thoughts. In fact, many Gnostics described their bodies as prisons in which their spiritual selves were locked up. And what their spiritual selves, their souls, really wanted was freedom from the body so that they could be reunited with the great big spirit in the sky.

It is hard for us to imagine life this way. As long as we’re healthy, we love our bodies, exercise them, diet, dress them up, romp in bed with them, play in them—and we think this is all great! But the ancient world was a place without aspirin or antibiotics, a place where life was often short, brutish, attended by poverty and hardship. Life in bodies was often hard and people longed for something better. They thought they might find it in spiritual release. Gnosticism promised people the secret wisdom (“gnosis” is the ancient Greek word for wisdom) that would help their souls escape the horrors of life in the body for real life in the spirit realm.

Gnosticism was too complex and diverse a religious movement to easily generalize about it. But much of the wisdom that they were focused on had to do with religious rules and regulations, habits and disciplines that focused on beating the body and its passions into submission, so that the body wouldn’t get in the way of the true spiritual self.

This means Gnostics were usually ascetic. They emphasized eating less, having less sex, meditation rather than exercise and worship and rituals rather than working and partying. In their places of worship they heard sermons about the secret passwords and rituals their spirits would need, once their bodies died, to join the great big spirit in the sky.

The New Testament warns against gnostic spirituality. Perhaps the best known such passage is in Colossians 2, where Paul warns Christians not to “let anyone condemn you in matters of food and drink or of observing festivals, new moons, or sabbaths.” He tells Christians not to submit to such “self-abasement,” or to people who say, “Do not handle, do not taste, do not touch.” Paul says such regulations as well as severe treatment of the body might have the appearance of wisdom—there is the Greek word “gnosis,”—but they are of no real value for Christians.

Why does Paul reject this kind of religion? Well because neither he, nor Christians in general, believe that life in the flesh means exile for the soul.

Ultimately the message of Christianity is that the body and its appetites are God-given gifts to be nurtured and enjoyed. According to the creation myth, God created Adam and Eve naked and not ashamed. Bodies are good! The Old Testament “Song of Songs” is a celebration of a good romp in bed with your beloved and enjoying this bodily pleasure as a divine gift. The story of Easter is that Jesus’ body was resurrected because a spirit without a body is missing something. And Paul taught that we are saved by grace rather than by secret wisdom about how to beat the body into submission.

I would say any religion that tries to make a good bottle of wine or beautiful painted nails or a feast with friends inherently evil is merely a gnostic-like misunderstanding of Christianity. Everything—Paul means all material things, in another tirade against Gnosticism from First Timothy—“everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected, provided it is received with thanksgiving.”

Religion that promotes a set of rules and regulations that always says “No!” to the body in order to promote one’s spiritual side isn’t what the Bible is about. True spiritual life is always life in the body. So long as we use our life in the body to love our neighbors, to pursue justice and mercy and the good for others that Jesus sought to demonstrate in his bodily life, we ought to enjoy our bodies as a divine gift.

So, by all means, pick up a copy A New New Testament or some other gnostic gospels. And allow yourself to be fascinated by how Christianity offers a very different perspective on the relation of body and soul.

Couple's Therapy

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Do you feel lonely even when you are with your spouse or partner?

Are you or your partner struggling to overcome an affair?

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This is, of course, my wife Irene Oudyk-Suk's Couples Therapy practice in Toronto. Irene has three kinds of opportunities that you can take advantage of. She offers regular therapy on a weekly or biweekly basis.

Irene has also pioneered Intensive Therapy weekends. In this mode, you and our partner will receive 18 hours of therapy over three days. Clients for this service come from all over North America. Irene has spoken to her professional association's international conference about pioneering this approach and is well-recognized for leading these sessions. She is aligned with Emotionally Focussed Therapy as developed by Sue Johnson (check out Sue's book, too, "Hold Me Tight.")

Twice a year Irene also offers fun and engaging weekend marriage retreats for people looking for more insight into their relationship.

Check out Irene's website at www.couplesinstep.com

And, share this note on your webpages and Facebook! Having moved from Mississauga to Toronto, Couples In Step could use the links to keep her high page rank for web searches!

When "The Faith" Won't Have Our Children

Normally, we expect our children both to do as they’re told and to think as we think—we parents, that is. But it doesn’t always work that way.

For example, Republican Senator Rob Portman, from Ohio, recently changed his mind about gay rights on account of his son. Portman has a strong record of voting against gay rights. But two years ago his son Will came out as gay. So this month Portman announced that he has changed his mind. He now favors same-sex marriage.

Similarly, in Toronto—well, until he was recently fired—another father in the same boat was Brian Burke, former GM of the Maple Leafs. Burke always played the gruff, dour, tough-talking macho role in his hockey career. But when his son Brendan came out as gay Burke immediately adopted a very public role in the fight against homophobia.

However, the spiritual and moral influence of children isn’t limited to the issue of gay rights. In my case, my children helped me change my mind about basic faith issues.

My two boys are crazy about social justice. They both work on behalf of the marginalized—refugees, those who have been attacked on account of xenophobia, victims of racism, and the poor. They have the idealism and energy of youth as they pursue political and social goals for the good of humanity.

But both have stopped going to church, too. At least, they don’t go very often! It isn’t that they’re against church or Christians. They have deep respect for many Christians. Both have been deeply influenced by their years in church and Christian ideals. But they see both sides of the faith coin—the idealism and the hypocrisy, the achievements and the failures. And so, overall, it doesn’t appear to them that you can count on the church, or on Christians, or on the Christian God to get the heavy social-justice lifting this world needs now, done.

Plus—this is my view, and my boys might differ with me on this—the whole Christian story lacks plausibility for them. Talk about God becoming human, immaculate conceptions, dying and rising, as well as insisting that you have to believe the right things about these stories—well, it doesn’t compute for them. Too much fairytale and not enough plausibility or coherence.

In my previous faith-community, my boys’ perspectives would have been seen as a reason for thinking that they might be out of favor with God and headed for some sort of eternal calamity. And their leaving the church would have been perceived as a shadow over my own work.

But I can’t agree with any of that—and much more—any more. Now, looking back, I see that my boys have helped me change my mind, too. They have given me a deeper and I think truer appreciation for the fairytale-like qualities of scripture, and for how Christians can’t agree about the meaning of much in scripture.

Most importantly, I love my boys and their dreams. This makes me wonder about God’s love. Surely, if God is a Father—or a divine Mother—God could not love my boys less than me! God is love, after all. And if God was going to make his love dependent on our getting ancient history, or interpretations of scripture, or doctrines right then God would surely have written a clearer explanation of that sort of stuff than what we find in the Bible.

Well, just for starters (and keeping in mind the eternal calamity that some Evangelicals are so concerned with) there is the matter of who is saved and why. Most Christians think people are saved by grace. But according to Matthew 25 the sheep and goats of the world are separated not on the basis of grace, or doctrine, or faith, but on the basis of works. Those who receive eternal rewards are those who feed the poor, give water to the thirsty, and entertain strangers. It is a passage that ought to make most Christians who have defined themselves as “saved,” and who sit in their comfortable pews week after week, squirm.

The long and short of it, though, is that whatever the theological particulars, my children’s perspectives on faith taught me much, even though I had the PhD. Their experience and questions, their searching and convictions, and their hypocrisy barometer all led me to revisit my own spiritual roots. And so I changed my mind. I left my old faith community and found a new one that better fit my new, evolving convictions.

And so I have learned that my love for my boys should not be directed just outwardly, at them. No, my love for my children also needs to be open to their insight and wisdom. Otherwise I might not ever change my mind or heart.

Who Will Go To Bree?

Some time after the destruction of the one ring—which you can read about in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings—Middle Earth’s new king, Aragorn, who had led the forces of good against the evil Lord Sauron, made it known that he wanted to visit The Hobbits of The Shire. So Sam Gamgee, mayor of Hobbiton, the largest village in The Shire, proclaimed a great feast. There would be fireworks. There would be pie eating contests. There would be excellent pipe weed on the house. Best of all, though, there would be plenty of food: tables full of meat and potatoes, red wine and bread, as much as any hobbit could eat or drink—which was to say, quite a bit. All because King Aragorn and his Hobbit friends had won a great victory.

Anyway, Mayor Sam Gamgee—a hobbit, who had with his dear friend Frodo, played a large role in the victory over evil Sauron himself, though that is another story for another time—Sam Gamgee proclaimed a great feast. There was only one problem. King Aragorn wanted Shire hobbits to invite humans from the village of Bree to join them.

Now, humans and hobbits had together, with the help of assorted elves, dwarves, and wizards, worked together to defeat the evil, odorous, Mordorous Sauron. So, said King Aragorn, hobbits and humans should nevermore live in suspicion of each other, as they did in the dark days of the War of the Ring. No, from here on in, said Aragorn, hobbits and humans would comfort each other; they would speak tenderly in each other’s villages and proclaim that their hard service had been completed and that the dark cloud of Sauron had been lifted. Henceforth humans and hobbits would deal with each other justly and walk humbly together in obedience to King Aragorn.

So Sam Gamgee proclaimed the feast. Everyone in the Shire was to come. Even the humans who live in Bree. The problem was that no hobbit in all the Shired dared be an ambassador to Bree.

Go to Bree? No way! Bree wasn’t even in the Shire! Bree was over the Brandywine River, beyond the East Farthing and Buckland, way on the other side of the High Hay Hedge, beyond the old forest—in the world maybe, but certainly not part of their Hobbiton world.

You see, most hobbits were born cowards—Sam and Frodo, Merry and Pippin being the notable exceptions who proved the rule. When it came to adventure they wanted to be left alone to read Left Behind, which was about as much anxiety as they could take. Hobbits liked nothing better than cocooning in their hobbit holes. So in all the Shire, even though the Hobbits feared King Aragorn, not one was found to take to the hiways and byways to make an appeal on Aragorn’s behalf—“come to the feast, you humans of Bree, and be reconciled to hobbits.”

Not one. After all, going to Bree meant living large. Going to Bree meant walking on water—or at least over it, on a bridge and out of the Shire. Going to Bree as an ambassador for King Aragorn means taking a—however miniscule—risk. So who was Mayor Sam Gamgee to send to Bree? Send you, perhaps, to Bree? Could you be an ambassador for Aragorn?

I mean, how many people do you know that are “Mister” or “Madame Ambassador?” In all of our Shire, Canada, only about two hundred people are so honored. Being an ambassador is a big deal. In fact, if I think about it, I personally know one recently retired American congressman, and two Ontario MPPs. I’ve sat down for a cup of coffee with Amway’s Richard DeVos once, and he told me about how, hours before he met with me he had tea at the White House with George Bush and his mother Barbara. I even know three people who shook hands with pope John Paul. So, I know some big shots—but I’ve never met a real flesh and blood ambassador!

But let me tell you something. Being an ambassador for Steven Harper--as special as that might be (or not)--is nothing compared to being an ambassador of the Lord of heaven’s star-fields and earth’s ocean depths. Being an ambassador for King Aragorn is nothing compared to being an ambassador on behalf of the King of glory, the LORD strong and mighty, the LORD who forgives all your sins and heals all your diseases.

Now, I need to stop here for a moment before my excitement carries me away. I understand that the way I just described God, using Biblical language and allusions, is a bit much for some of us. We recognize that such language about God is actually metaphorical, and that whoever and whatever God really is, God isn’t a white-haired King sitting on a throne.

Still, close to the heart of the gospel is this idea that whoever, exactly, God is, what God hopes and dreams for us is that we will make this world a garden of shalom, a place of love and compassion, justice and mercy that would make Jesus, our model for being a divine ambassador, proud.

We are God’s ambassadors of reconciliation, says Paul in 2 Corinthians 5. In fact, being ambassadors from God to all the Shires of this world is exactly what Christians do for Jesus. And like all ambassadors, you are an ambassador whatever you do, wherever you go. It isn’t just a job, you see—it is your profession, it is what you do with your whole lives—it is your reason for being.

Whether you’re in your hobbit hole or at church; whether you are taking a break at work or sitting down for a cold one at the nineteenth hole with some golf buddies; whether you are making an big energy purchase for your industrial conglomerate or just recycling CD batteries—in each case, you are an ambassador of the exact kind of reconciliation that Jesus was an ambassador for. As an ambassador, you are someone who isn’t hobbled by an earthly point of view, says Paul, but someone who is a new creation, who has put hobbit cowardice and fear behind him or her, someone who is ready and eager to live large even when it is scary to do so.

Of course, ambassadors need certain skills. For example, and perhaps most importantly, ambassadors need a words, like Moses needed Aaron and like Gimli the dwarf needed his axe.

It is through listening to the Word, after all, that we come to know Jesus and love his way, even though we have not personally seen his wounds. It is through the Word that the Spirit grabs our heart and bends our wills, even though we never felt the flames of fire on our heads.

And then with the Word lit within us, we can speak our own words after wherever we find ourselves. Using words we can urge our government to replace its CF18s with pruning hooks, and urge terrorists to trade their bombs for watering cans. It is through words that we can warn the world, as the White Wizard Isaiah did, long ago, that it is folly to put our trust in horses and chariots, and—like most Hobbits, to spend our time chasing after worldly goods and comforts rather than justice and peace for our neighbor. Only words—confirmed by our actions and lifestyles--can convince our neighbors that there is an ironclad law of God written into the very structure of Middle Earth—and that is that grace wins.

This is the meaning of life—to let the Word live in us so that we live out the word, so that the love we speak about isn’t just a boast, but an in out of the cold reality.

But back in the Shire and the rest of my story about the visit of King Aragorn. As I said, no hobbit could be found who would go to Bree as King Aragorn’s ambassador of good tidings. So finally, in desperation, Sam Gamgee asked the only hobbit he could even imagine might be willing to go. Sam asked a little hobbit woman, Annie Agon to go. After all, she had more than a little Brandybuck blood in her.

And Sam Gamgee said, “Annie, I know other people think you’re a fool, being a swimmer and a dieter and nonsmoker. I know that people think lowly of you and because you’re brave enough to test the Brandywine River. Hobbits tell me that you’ve even been known to invite visiting rangers to your hobbit hole for tea and crumpets. You’ve spoken up for Tooks who have been wronged and laughed at Grima Wormtongue by giving him your larder when all he wanted was the coat off your back.

So, Sam Gamgee said, Annie Agon, I know you ain’t much—but you’re just the one to be an ambassador to Bree and invite those humans in; invite them to our great feast. Being Aragorn’s ambassador doesn’t mean that you are going to change Shire history all by yourself or make trolls and ogres shake in fear. But you have the Aragorn’s word! You have good news! Go!

And then what was Annie Agon to do? Rise to the occasion, deliver the good news, and have an adventure? Or for that matter, what are we to do? Mind our own business? Go along with the rest of the Hobbits to get along? Or make our lives’ work living and speaking the good news that evil has been defeated and we can love?

What shall we do? The people of Bree are waiting.