arkadianriver |
| Whoa, powerful sermon! |
12:38 am |
Thanks for the reference, Sal.
"The Christian Paradox: How a faithful nation gets Jesus wrong", by Bill McKibben.
I especially like this phrase:
It's hard to imagine a con much more audacious than making Christ the front man for a program of tax cuts for the rich or war in Iraq. If some modest part of the 85 percent of us who are Christians woke up to that fact, then the world might change.
It almost makes me want to become a Christian again.
<digress>
But then no, I remember how I feel that the whole thing could easily be a con. The Gospels I can swallow. But Peter and Paul, I dunno, they're too preachy and egocentric. I also remember how modern church leaders label the socially responsible non-Christians as secular humanists. The intention might be to send home the message that it's not enough to do good but you need to believe in Christ as well. But all it does is set Christians apart from a group of truly good intentioned people, demonstrating yet again the divisive tendency that is built into the logic of Christianity. Listening to Pat Robertson on the 700 Club talk of humanism in the 80s, he made it sound like an instrument of Satan, as if it were a bad thing to be concerned about the humanity of the world. And, today's prophecy interpreters seem to feel the same way about almost any kind of peace process. After all, according to Revelation, world peace is a sign of the antichrist. So, who was the smart guy who left pen and parchment with that crazy old coot on Patmos. ;-)
</digress>
But.. anway.. ya. That Bill has got us totally pegged, most of us Americans and our Christian churches. It's a way cool read and not as politically charged as that one quote above might lead you to believe. It's just good "Jesus" teaching (as opposed to Christian).
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Comments:
| [Anonymous] |
| Sep. 4th, 2006 - 05:15 pm | | |
It's just good "Jesus" teaching (as opposed to Christian).
Amen. I really enjoyed the article, too, when Sal first posted it.
--
Lily
http://lilyslaughter.com |
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| [Anonymous] |
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Christian again | May. 19th, 2007 - 11:46 am | | |
Hi Gary -
I still identify as a Christian, though I attend the Unitarian Universalist Society of San Francisco. Many people self-identify as secular humanists here, and I doubt they'd accept the notion that Christians imposed the label on them.
For better or worse, despite theological or dogmatic pronouncements from church leaders or hierarchies, religion continues to take on the form of the personality and character of the local practitioners. If the locals are judgmental or open hearted, so is the religion. If they're tolerant or bigoted, so is the religion. Such it has always been.
I learned a lot by reading contemporary New Testament scholars associated with the Jesus Seminar, convened by Robert Funk and the Westar Institute. The more you read, the clearer things become, because it is the job of scholarship to separate history from theology -- and add cross-disciplinary insights from sociology, anthropology, psychology, and archeology. We know a lot more today than we did in 1940, before the manuscript discoveries at Nag Hammadi in Egypt. You learn about the difference between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith ("Christ" is a title, not a name.) You learn how to apply methodologies of literary form analysis, chronological stratification in the tradition, and multiple attestation in the sources to extract the voiceprint of the historical Jesus of Nazareth.
The picture that emerges is enlightening - the more so because the scholars did everything humanly possible to find what was there by being faithful to the method, to avoid drawing conclusions based on what they expected to find. Jesus was probably an illiterate peasant, who relied on brilliant oratory rather than the written word. He was not an apocalyptic figure at all, and his faith was in an unfolding Kingdom of God (literally, "Imperial Rule of God") that presented open resistance to the imperial rule of Rome in the here and now, not some future divine intervention. The rest is the imposition of the theology of the early Church, decades after his execution.
Jesus' program was aimed a a peasant culture populated by farmers, many of them dispossessed by systemic debt and an exploitative, two-tiered society. He offered a free exchange of healing for eating -- open commensality to replace honor and shame. He offered unbrokered access to the realm of God for everyone, as a radical alternative the the Mediterranean system of clientage and patronage. He was not popular with elites then, and he would not be popular today.
So for many contemporary Christians, rediscovering the historical roots of the Jesus movement has enabled us to continue to identify ourselves as Christians in a post-modern context. I like what journalist and clergyman Bill Moyers said in February at Occidental College in Los Angeles:
"Over the past few years as we witnessed the growing concentration of wealth and privilege in our country, prophetic religion lost its voice, drowned out by the corporate, political, and religious right who hijacked Jesus.
That's right: They hijacked Jesus. The very Jesus who stood in Nazareth and proclaimed, "The Lord has anointed me to preach the good news to the poor" - this Jesus, hijacked by a philosophy of greed. The very Jesus who fed 5000 hungry people - and not just those in the skyboxes; the very Jesus who offered kindness to the prostitute and hospitality to the outcast; who raised the status of women and treated even the hated tax collector as a citizen of the Kingdom. The indignant Jesus who drove the money changers from the temple - this Jesus was hijacked and turned from a friend of the dispossessed into a guardian of privilege, the ally of oil barons, banking tycoons, media moguls and weapons builders."
That's enough to make me a Christian. They can't hijack him on my watch.
Pace e bene,
Thomas Atwood |
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