Wednesday, September 30, 2009

The Pope and Economics

David Nirenberg has an article in The New Republic entitled "Love and Capitalism." He analyzes Pope Benedict's latest encyclical "Caritas in Veritate." He appreciates the content of the Pope's teaching. For example, Benedict says, "To love someone is to desire that person's good and to take effective steps to secure it." B16's assertion is that economic activity has to have love as the basis.


 

Now this is the kind of assertion about economics that you don't hear discussed on news programs. Nirenberg takes us back into history and reminds us that the Church has for centuries warned against the potential harm in economic exchanges. Jesus of course was very hard on people with lots of money or possessions. He practically said that they were locked out of heaven. In the Middle Ages, "merchant" and "Christian" were nearly mutually exclusive terms. In the Church's writings was this declaration: "a merchant can rarely or never please God. Therefore no Christian should be a merchant, and, if he wishes to be one, he should be expelled from the Church."


 

Even though Nirenberg appreciates the Pope's teaching on economic principles, he is critical of the exclusive religious language used by B16. The author thinks the Pope's language is too dogmatic. Well? Of course the Pope's teaching is going to be dogmatic. Of course it's going to be exclusive. The author's point though is well taken. He says, "The prescriptions that we produce from within our own communities of conviction must be intelligible and adoptable outside of them. They must make sense to people who do not already share all of those convictions."


 

This is a familiar problem for religious groups. Each group has its own terminology that is not shared by the general public. The ongoing questions is: can we in the church speak to our culture or society in terms that make sense to the common person and persuade using logic that is not foreign to the general public?

Or—can the church speak in terms that not only bear witness to our unique beliefs, but also communicate obvious truth to those outside our community of faith?


 

That's a real theological challenge. However, in defense of the Pope, he wasn't writing a Letter to the world in general. An encyclical is an official letter written to the church itself. The Pope does talk a lot about 'natural law'—that is, the truth that anyone can understand and accept because it is 'natural.' But the church cannot stop there. There is also supernatural truth—that which comes only by revelation. There's the rub.

Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Book of Revelation

The Book of Revelation. Thomas Jefferson said that the last book of the Bible is "merely the ravings of a maniac." The great reformer Martin Luther said that he almost left the Book of Revelation out of his German translation of the Bible because "Christ is not taught or known in it."

I think Revelation is best understood as a long theological cartoon book. It's written in pictures—at least in mental pictures. The reader has to imagine pictures in her mind as she reads it. Of course it was originally an oral event. It was book read in public to the congregation. The images are weird on purpose—in order to stick in the imagination.

It wasn't actually weird to the first century listeners. They were familiar with the apocalyptic terminology that John (the author) used. John makes 404 allusions to Old Testament passages (without actually quoting any). He simply took the cartoon language already in the Bible and reused it. John took the main narratives of the Old Testament (especially the story of the Exodus) and brought them into a new situation. Revelation simply continues the story. It's not weird or silly if we keep the images connected to the story that has already been told in the other books of the Bible.

Revelation is about the Lamb that defeats the Beast. He defeats it without physical violence. The believers are never told in Revelation to take up arms and fight. Rather, they are told to be patient, to give their testimony, and to hold to the Word. God is the one who fights. The Lamb makes war. His weapon is the sword of the Word.

The violent images and the bloodshed in Revelation are symbolic. To take the symbolic in scripture and imagine it to be literal is to do damage to God's Word. In the Apocalypse evil is defeated by the Word.

Revelation is a book of hope. But not hope based on human violence. It certainly isn't a prediction of the future. It doesn't tell us about the future; it tells us about the present—the ever present reality of God. Revelation is about what is real now. Christ IS Lord. Now.

The real question posed by the Last Book is: will you bow to Christ or to the Empire? It's a call to decision.

Monday, September 28, 2009

Wm Safire & God

News of the death of William Safire came today.
I like to read people who love words.
Even though Safire had a much more conservative political view than I do, I enjoyed reading his opinions because they were well thought out.

A few years ago when I was leading a study on the Book of Job, I read Safire's book, The First Dissident: The Book of Job in Today's Politics. It was an interesting read. He takes Job's statement, "Though you slay me, I will trust you," to be a mistranslation of the Hebrew. His translation: "He may slay me, I'll not quaver." The sentence in the Hebrew Bible is ambiguous since the Hebrew word for 'bless' can also mean 'curse.' That's confusing, isn't it? But Safire is right in that the verse may mean the opposite of what the traditional version has it. Safire understands the Book of Job to be supporting the political idea that when authorities practice injustice we have a right--no, an obligation--to oppose them (just as Job opposed God's injustice toward him).

We need conservatives (and liberals) like Safire--who make us think--and take language seriously.

Saturday, September 26, 2009

quoting the bible

it's easy to quote scritpure
the sign shown above shows how we selectively choose our verses
none of us want to accept and use all of the bible
we use only those parts that we want to
of course there are ways of explaining which parts
are still in play and those that are not
we conveniently nullify those parts that we don't want to follow
i don't follow all of the bible and no one else does either
our bias comes out when we decide which parts to ignore
fundamentalists who belief every verse literally
literally ignore many verse
yes, they explain how they decide
we can always find a way to explain our cut-and-paste methods
when we say 'the bible says,'
we really mean 'my version of the bible says'
you want to follow everything in the bible?
good luck

Tuesday, September 22, 2009

The borken pieces



You know the story of how Moses went up the mountain and received the Ten Commandments from God on two stone tablets. And how when he came down from the mountain he saw that the Israelites with the help of Aaron had built
a golden calf. And how Moses got angry and threw down the stone tablets
and smashed them to pieces...And how later Moses went back up the mountain and got two new tablets from God.


A Jewish legend says that when they put the Ten Cs into the Ark of the covenant (a big box), they also had scooped up the broken pieces of the original tablets and put them into the ark also. As they traveled with the ark, both the broken pieces and the new, whole tablets were contained therein.

Which means that all of us carry with us not only our wholeness, but also our brokenness. We bring our past along with us on the journey of life. We acknowledge the inevitable brokenness of life. We combine the broken and the whole, to remind ourselves that life is always ambiguous--our shattered dreams live on as part of our re-creation of life. Nothing is lost. We can salvage the essential elements of our ideals and bring them with us into the future.

God does not leave us in our shattered condition. She gives us a new start--new tablets. God is full of grace.

Each of us contains both wholeness and brokenness. That's the way life is. But God allows us to move forward without perfection. Failure is not the end. It is only one place along the continuing journey.

Tuesday, September 15, 2009

Golda Meir


I finished reading My Life, the autobiography of Golda Meir.
It may have changed my political views of Israel.
I certainly understand better the internal motivation of Israel's aggressive
defense of its land and people.
I had already understood it in my head, but now I have a more emotional
grasp of what is going on in the psyche of the Zionists.

Golda Mabovitch was born in Russia and spent a few years there. Then her parents moved to Milwaukee where Golda grew up and was educated. She became Golda Meyerson when she married, and later changed her name to the Hebrew name Meir. She became interested in the Socialist/Zionist Movement when she was pretty young. In her twenties she took the radical step of moving to Palestine to live in a kibbutz. The kibbutz communities were socialist experiments where everyone pooled their money and possessions and shared the work. She loved it. But eventually she was invited to join official structures of the 'government' and had to leave the kibbutz.

This is a great history book, telling the story of the making of the State of Israel, it's challenges, its survival, and its sense of peoplehood. It's also the story of a great national leader from her own point of view. She writes about her relationship with other national leaders, especially David Ben-Gurion, but also President Nixon, Kissinger, de Gaulle, and many others.

This 450 page book is written with such clarity and smoothness that it's a joy to read. Meir has a wonderful way of describing the positive characteristics of her co-workers, but at the same time relating how she sometimes disagreed with them and had spats from time to time.

Little Israel (about the size of New Jersey) is surrounded by 20 hostile Arab neighbors. Several of those surrounding countries have tried to destroy Israel in its short history (having become a Nation is 1948). The only way Israel can survive is to be aggressive in its retaliation and sometimes preemptive in its military actions.

I suppose I have a more balanced view of Israel's relationship with its neighbors after reading this book. It is obviously written with a slanted point of view. But it comes from the heart.

There is still the issue of how Israel treats the Palestinians as a question of justice. Israel is a secular State. It doesn't pretend to be a religious State. And as a secular State we shouldn't expect it to follow in the line of the prophetic tradition of the Hebrew Bible. Nations operate on the basis of security and self-interest, not on any spiritual motivation. So, Israel is no different than the USA or any other country in regard to it foreign policies or strategies for survival.

This book is in our church library, though I bought my own used copy. The Middle East situation needs to be understood by hearing from all sides, and seeing it through the eyes of those who are there.

Golda was a spunky leader.

Sunday, September 13, 2009

dealing with anxiety

Once again Therese Borchard's blog "Beyond Blue" gives some
good advice on dealing with destructive emotions--this time 'anxiety.'

She gives 5 steps here.

I like the one about clouds.

infection in the church

Another great blog from Rev. Jan Edmiston...
It's about an infection that is spreading in the church:

Read it here.

Thursday, September 3, 2009

the second bounce


I ran across a phrase in an article by John McCardell in The Atlantic:

"...about as effective as a parachute that opens on the second bounce."

I have never heard that before. I don't know if he made it up or it had been around for awhile.
Some things we do at church are effective; some are not. I wonder which ones are "about as effective as a parachute that opens on the second bounce." Whatever they are, we ought to stop doing them. Can you identify anything like that?


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