3 James Cone's Theology As A (Not "The") Way Forward

and How Our Understanding Of Morality Changes In The Details As We Must Confront Newer Facts And Newer Depravities

God is present in People struggling for life and not in the abstract metaphysical world of reason which is only inhabited by philosophers, theologians and other privileged intellectuals.  The Christian God is not the god of Plato, Kant and Hegel, but rather the God of the Exodus and the Prophets and of Jesus.  If God is in the world where People are abused and exploited, what, then, is God doing?  That was my question.

James Cone:  Black Blood Crying Out And The Rise of Black Liberation Theology

I'M GOING TO KEEP risking giving the enemies of Christianity and religion stuff to work with in their quest to discredit Christianity and religion among People who are shallow thinkers. Shallow thinkers with a predisposition to deny the morality of the Law, the Prophets and the Gospel and their moral responsibility to the least among us don't need my help in doing what they want to do anyway.  And a lot of them, especially these days, call themselves "Christians."  Since God told Moses from the burning bush that People will know who God is by what God will do, as James Cone confirmed in the quote above, I don't think anyone can be faulted for thinking that "Christians" are as "Christians" do not what they claim to believe.  

My critique of a few lines from Paul are hardly news, though if you've never read Paul and depend on only the few sour cherries picked from the cake for the purpose of discrediting Christianity or to turn it into a religion of hate and violence, it probably is new for you.  We know that Paul was far from entirely accepted among even those who knew Jesus in the flesh.  He and Peter had some major areas of disagreement, probably James as well, the leaders of the original Church in Jerusalem.  Part of that was due to those who the two sides felt called to minister to, who was included and who was excluded from their imagination of what the Christian assembly was.  Our knowledge of how those disagreements played out comes pretty much from Paul and what is generally considered a pro-Paul source, Acts.  Some of the issues we know about, whether or not gentile converts to the Jesus movement had to convert to Judaism including such major and painful issues as circumcision was certainly an important difference among them. Whether or not to eat with gentiles, whether or not you could eat things they ate but which were forbidden to eat under the Mosaic Law.* Paul's reasoning in why such legal issues were of secondary importance or of no real importance won out, though those who had known Jesus and who Paul almost certainly got the Gospel from had priority and being actual witnesses to the ministry of Jesus to add weight to their view points. None of that is news. Reportedly, in Acts, Peter came to some of the same conclusions about commensality and what a follower of Jesus was allowed to eat but I am skeptical of the authenticity of that story in Acts as I am the legend of the couple who withheld the proceeds of the sale of their property.  But am prepared to be wrong in my skepticism.  

I will point out that from Paul's infamous instruction that Women were to be silent in church assemblies, Elizabeth A. Johnson concludes that we can be fairly confident that Women in the Church in Corinth were speaking in church and that the reaction of the Women in Corinth to Paul's instruction is not recorded in history or Scripture. Before Paul's letters became Scripture, they were just letters.  We do know that Paul's attitude towards Women is otherwise remarkably "liberal" for the time because he noted some were his valued co-ministers and even the leaders of churches.  You get the feeling that Paul wasn't entirely consistent on issues like that and he is the person in the New Testament other than Jesus who is presented in enough detail to get something like a feeling for who he was.

I've been thinking of transcribing James Cone's lecture as given at Yale in 2017 though I'd expect he must have published the text as he would have liked it to be read, I just don't have it.  I have been transcribing passages I found especially fruitful for consideration.

Transcribing from videos, listening, stopping, remembering and writing down, phrase by phrase, sentence by sentence, going over it again with the recording for accuracy is one of the best ways I know of really listening to a lecture or sermon or interview. I've come to value listening to a recording of those more than in-person listening because you can do that, going back to listen again, almost as easily as you can review a written text. That's one of the reasons I post so many lectures, sermons, interviews, etc.   Though useful, typing out a written text is too easy to get you into something as deeply as transcribing the spoken word will force you to get. I might continue that for a while, it's something I can do off-line and once you get used to the irregular rhythm of it, it's quite enjoyable.  

In her book,  Quest for the Living God, the theologian Elizabeth A. Johnson, already mentioned, devotes separate chapters to short explorations of different current, emerging schools of Christian theology, Feminist, Womanist, Mujerista, liberation theologies, etc.  I can't find my copy of the book this morning so I can't give you a full list. Of course there will be major and minor differences in theology as seen from the points of view that those different theologies arose from. Those differences don't come just between different theologies but within those, as well.  Which is not disconfirming of anything except the silly idea that human beings can be expected to be uniform in their lives and experiences and that any of us can singly or collectively know the entire Truth about God and God's Creation.

God is too big to fit into one human mind or in all of human minds put together. We imagine such a thing which, of course, cannot exist, you only have in mind what's in your mind, that's as much reality as anyone can have while in the flesh. It's a simple fact of thinking about God that different People will have different ideas because our lives are different.   That's been as true of theology as it is any other branch of study, whether philosophical, historical, scientific, pseudo-scientific (especially that since it's so reliant on untethered imagination), etc. So that absence of a consensus is nothing that anyone who knows the first thing about human fields of endeavor needs to be bothered by.  It's who we are. I doubt that even some species we are accustomed to imagining as if they were mindless automata such as ants or bees, if they did theology would fail to achieve that kind of diversity.

If you forget the necessity of that diversity it can be jarring to hear someone such as James Cone insisting on the validity of his own basis of reading Scripture and doing theology, the video of him giving the same lecture at Union Seminary has a white member of the audience complaining rudely and bitterly about the focus of Cone's Black Liberation Theology coming from and being primarily devoted to the conditions of Black People.  But one of Cone's points is that such a focus and such addressing your theology to a specific human group is entirely legitimate, it's defined the practice of theology from and addressed to white people or, rather, specific groups of white people even excluding subsets of white people, entirely ignoring Black People, other People of Color, Women in all of their diversity, LGBTQ+ in all of our diversity, etc.  

As to the experience of listening to that diversity being jarring, being jarred out of our present thinking is good.  Consider the reports of the Prophets as to their experiences of hearing the voice of God, being jarred out of customary thinking is necessary. Comfortable thinking should be suspect.

In that way the insistence on the different established denominations that there be a uniform standard of belief, a claim of the exclusive truth of one set of beliefs is a guarantee of inadequacy. I was raised a Catholic probably the denomination with the largest and most extensive baggage of such standard beliefs, believe me, I've seen that. And some of that, some of what could be accused of being post-Scriptural thinking, is certainly not bad though a lot of it is.

There are certainly some things that you cannot include in something taken as Christianity if the Gospel of Jesus is to be the actual basis of it. Which has never stopped Christians from including some of those, especially when those issues center on wealth, power and the violent enforcement of uniformity of professed belief.  I think the Two Great Commandments, Love God and love others, the condensation of The Law and Prophets,Do to others what you would have them do to you, the stated requirement to enter into the Kingdom of God, to do to the least among you what you would do to God, The New Commandment, Love one another as I've loved you, are non-negotiable foundations,though, of course, even many established churches and individuals even while  claiming to accept those violate them continually and even on an official basis. We are all sinners as Paul's extensive list of human evils says.  About the only things that Jesus warned would get you a term in hell were being rich, not doing good for the least among you, corrupting innocents, and one that the Churches specialize in so often, blaspheming the Holy Spirit, the more ready the Church to damn People to hell, the more likely they seem to be to violate that last one.  Jesus didn't mention engaging in a consensual, adult, loving, faithful and mutually caring same sex marriage based in equality in that category and Paul didn't claim that he did.  

I guess, as accused,  I've been doing LGBTQ+ theology here, what some call Queer Theology, though I'm not fond of that term. Oddly, as a Gay Christian, I haven't come across a Queer Theologian whose writing really grabs me, though some of it is interesting and much of it is a restatement of rather common liberal Protestant theology which I accept. I do find Black Liberation Theology compelling as I do the Liberation Theology that came and comes out of Latin America in ways I don't find a lot of more traditional and official theology compelling. I think recently trying Karl Rahner may be the last time I dip into elite white theology though Hans Kung's dissident Catholic theology is well worth reading again.

I might find the ideas of God from philosophers interesting, at times, but I never find they are especially compelling or useful or, in the end, as convincing as God described as James Cone described God, above.  Like I admitted I've never taken classes in this stuff but, then, none of the Apostles or named disciples graduated from a school of theology.  I doubt any of them except, perhaps, Paul could have gotten accepted in one (I assume he was literate though a lot of modern scholars doubt that). A number of those who wrote the books of the New Testament probably would have failed Greek composition according to what the Greek scholars I've read on those topics think.  Reading David Bentley Hart's translation in which he consciously followed such things as the verb tenses the writers wrote, much of it is remarkably and gratifyingly like "sub-standard" English.  And that's not surprising or, in terms of the Words of Jesus, disqualifying. One of the groups Jesus said to watch out for over and again were the scribes. None of them would have been ordained by any main-stream or many "evangelical" denominations in the United States which have far more stringent requirements of academic respectability than they do lives of demonstrable love, nor hope or, really, faith. Lots of them are just mean bastards. Though I wouldn't necessarily say the sects that seem to ordain just anyone seem to have a leg up in credibility or integrity. A lot of those are more like franchise businesses than churches and some of their clergy, Protestant though they may be, rival the most corrupt of the high Renaissance Popes that got Luther pissed off.* James Cone in giving his lecture points out that Jesus didn't say "Blessed are the intelligent."  He certainly didn't say "Blessed are the credentialed."

* Vegan Theology

An article I read from the Chief Rabbi of Dublin a few years back convinced me that far from Paul and Peter's decision that you could eat pigs, etc., today, now, the changed circumstances of life with so many billions of human meat eaters, apart from the inescapable cruelty of eating animals that the Earth could not sustain carnivorism meant that only a vegan diet could be considered as moral. I'd been a vegetarian for half a century at that point.  I have to say since I gave up eating dairy products and eggs (after my last hens died and my supply of knowably cruelty free eggs ended) my health had been better.  I got compliments on my looks for the first time in my life, now that they're of little use to me. Then I got the meat-industry generated disease of Covid-19.

The incredible cruelty of animal husbandry as a given - the number of cute day-old male chicks thrown live into grinders every hour of every day is stunning, they should choke on that as they guzzle their American-Imperial religious Super-Bowl communion of chicken wings - it is the consequences of concentration death camps for billions of animals in generating pandemic viruses which will compel those issues to be addressed in ways that challenge what Paul wrote on the topic and the account of Peter's permissive dream in Acts.  

The knowledge of the morality of human actions and choices changes with changed circumstances, even on that level of moral consideration.  I hold that even much of the recorded moral code in Scripture is an imperfect record of the human understanding of morality, both in what is prohibited and what is permitted.  But the foundation of The Law and the Prophets in egalitarian treatment of others doesn't change.

The rise of artificially grown meat derived from cells taken from living animals may be an entirely different, possibly morally neutral issue. The morality of it will depend on what harms come of it or not.

I did have one disturbing idea about that come to me one night as I lay awake tossing and turning. The possibility of an industry in such meat derived from human cells "cruelty free cannibalism" becoming a thing, and if it could be turned into a profitable fad, you can count on it happening.  I would guess that there are real, though I'll bet suppressed issues of the generation and passing on of novel viruses or even pathological protein diseases could very well arise from it. You can count on the monumentally stupid and defective, profit protecting United States Constitution won't do a thing about that even well after it becomes a known human health catastrophe.  It can't even deal with the epidemic of gun-industry, Hollywood psychopath encouraged gun murder in a way to protect the children of the country, despite what it claims the purpose of that document is.

The Supreme Court said in 1857 in the land mark Dred Scott Decision that Black People had no rights that white people were bound to respect.  There are large segments of the American People who  still believe that. And much of the criminal justice system operates on that assumption. The glorfication of one race and the consequent debasement of another has always been a recipe for murder.
James Cone

 
And it should never be forgotten that the motive of writing a Constitution that would give Roger Taney and his colleagues the chance to make that the law of the land was the profit of the slavers of the various states in the Constitutional Convention.  Slavery was always in service to the wealth of the wealthy, their harnessing of racism to sucker poor whites was an afterthought to that.

The issue that wealth is so frequently that it perhaps should always be considered as an occasion of sin and death has never really had the place in Christian religion that the Gospel of Jesus, the Epistles of Paul and James require it be given before anything like authentic following of Jesus can be done.

Considering most of the oppression that he discusses has little to nothing to do with the practice of religion - violent mobs aren't generally notable for their piety - James Cone specifically is hardest on theologians in his lecture and the focus of his theology but, as him giving his lecture so critical of so many eminent white theologians at some of the major theological seminaries shows, theologians are more open to that kind of self-reflective, perhaps reformative criticism.   

I would bet you can't find much of anything like that in most other academic fields, it's true that you won't find a lot of it in many conservative schools of theology. I'd bet you'd have to search long and hard for such eminent law schools to invite comparably disruptive lecturers to speak to such large audiences.  
 

Note: After Good Pope Francis, watch out for the next Pope who opts to live in the papal apartment in the Vatican instead of a modest place in some hotel or rooming house or who comes out in the fancy duds that Francis rejected as soon as he was elected. That will not be a good sign.  I hope and pray he has more good years now that he doesn't have the dead hand of Benedict XVI and his henchmen inhibiting him. Another Benedict or JPII would probably destroy the Church because it would mean the billionaire gangsters won.

Part 2

IT IS CERTAINLY noteworthy that in not a single one of the Gospels does Jesus say a single word against same-sex sexual relationships. I know of one scholar who, when someone pointed that out said she assumed that Jesus figured everyone knew what we now would call gay and Lesbian sex were wrong so he took that for granted. As I recall, I didn't think the scholar was particularly friendly to the Gospel or to Jesus or to Christianity, at least not conventional Christianity,  and would not have wanted something so welcome as acceptance of LGBTQ+ sexuality to a modern, egalitarian audience to have been attributable to Jesus.  As I recall she was "that" style of "historical Jesus" historian.   

If that is going to be your accepted criterion for finding in the Word of Jesus what isn't said explicitly - or any other text, for that matter - what can't you claim he left out because he assumed it was generally assumed?  I will point out that not one of the four canonical Gospel writers attributed such words to Jesus nor those who may have added to them during the process of what became the more or less standardized forms of the Gospels so we can assume they would have, also, assumed that Jesus said nothing about same-sex sexual relationships worth mentioning, either.  And, I will point out, that considering other New Testament commentary seems to assume that Jews under the Roman pagan occupation would have been witness to and, no doubt, tempted by and robustly condemned all manner of, by Jewish Law, illicit sex as much as they would have other illicit pagan practice, such an omission in the recorded Words of Jesus is far better suspected of being an expression of intentionally withholding such ideas than of what that modern scholar presumes.

Nor, I will point out, does Paul specifically attribute any condemnation of same-sex sexual activity to the words of Jesus, which, if that was within the Gospel as he learned it from those who heard Jesus in life, since he specifically goes into that subject, is a notable omission on his part.  What to make of that, it turns out from the context of how he said what he did on the subject, is far from an easy thing.

In the usual layout of the New Testament the first thing you will come to that impinges on same-sex sex is in Romans, what is often considered Paul's magnum opus, in Chapter 1, verses 24 through 32 Paul explicitly condemns, first Women having "unnatural" sex which he doesn't define as having sex with other Women but he is more explicit if still problematically vague* in accusing Males of having sex with other Males.

But that isn't the only thing he's saying is wrong in his condemnation of gentile paganism as you can see if you take in more of the setting of those words.  Just from what was much, much later designated to be the First Chapter you can see the context which I have never heard a queer-basher quote when they extract those words, words in which just about anyone, no matter what sex and what sexual orientation, Jew or gentile, pagan or confessor of Jesus could, if they were honest, find within themselves.  

18For God’s vehemence against all the impiety and injustice of human
beings, who by injustice suppress the truth, is revealed from heaven,
19Because what is known of God is manifest among them; because God made it manifest to them. 20For from the creation of the cosmos his invisible things are clearly descried, understood from the things made: both his everlasting power and his deity; so they are without defense, 21For, knowing God, they did not give him glory and thanks as God, but instead grew inane in their reasoning, and their witless heart was darkened. 22Having pretensions to be wise, they became imbeciles, 23And exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for a likeness of the image of a corruptible man, and of birds, and of
quadrupeds, and of reptiles; 24Hence God handed them over in the desire of their hearts to impurity, the disgracing of their bodies amongst themselves —25They who exchanged God’s truth for a lie, and adored and worshipped the creation rather than the Creator who is blessed unto the ages; amen. 26Thus God delivered them to the passions of disgrace; for even their females exchanged natural use for what is contrary to nature, 27And the males also, in the same way, abandoning natural use with the female, burned in their longing
for one another, males performing shameful acts among males, and receiving in turn within themselves the requital befitting their deviancy. 28And, as they did not deem it worthwhile to acknowledge God, God surrendered them to a reprobate mind, to do indecent things, 29Having been filled with every injustice, wickedness, avarice, vice; full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, boorishness; whisperers, 30Slanderers, haters of God, licentious, overweening, braggarts, contrivers of evils, defiant of parents; 31Witless, faithless, ruthless, merciless—32Though knowing God’s decree that those who do such things are deserving of death, they not only do them, but give approval to those engaging in these same practices.

Romans 1:18-32 David Bentley Hart translation

I would start by pointing out Paul seems to take a lot for granted in this passage, he assumes that his theological and cosmological framing was generally revealed to gentiles and Jews and that pagan worship of anthropomorphic and zoomorphic idols and gods was a conscious decision to turn away from the God Who is revealed in the Jewish monotheistic conception that Paul (and I, by the way) accept as real instead of misconceived.  

His brush with which he paints that picture of depravity is incredibly broad and the general picture of depravity he paints, including, certainly, huge swipes of dirt which are shared in, fully, not only by pagans whose sexual desires and practice is strictly hetero-sexual but by those who maintain themselves in chastity.  I fully accept that many of the figures in Christian history who vowed themselves to not have sex were faithful to that vow (to which they felt themselves called, as Paul more or less confesses he was) but whose likenesses are rather well caught by Paul's colorful categories of degeneracy and sinfulness.  "Impiety, injustice, adoring aspects of creation instead of the Creator, refusing to give glory to God, inane in their reasoning (looking for excuses to do what they want, no doubt the foremost reason for that), a pretension to be wise, (and a full bore shell of buckshot) filled with every injustice, wickedness, avarice, vice; full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, boorishness; whisperers, slanderers, haters of God, licentious, overweening, braggarts, contrivers of evils, defiant of parents; witless, faithless, ruthless, merciless

Despite what I've heard Republican-fascist TV hallelujah peddlers misrepresent as Paul's call for the death penalty for people who engage in same-sex sex (before they shake down the suckers for donations) Paul was pretty much giving such an inclusive list of those who "deserve death" that no one in his audience could possibly have escaped.  In his famous declaration that Jesus was like us in all things EXCEPT IN SIN, if you take that as something he really believed then he was pretty much saying that everyone except Jesus was "deserving of death."

I will accuse Paul of the sin of bearing false witness in that there are certainly People who engage in same-sex sex, especially those who do so only in a framework of egalitarian love and justice and faithfulness, who he slanders when he attributes those things to them, though Paul was clearly ignorant of the possibility of that kind of same-sex sexual life.  He certainly would have known he could just as well have attributed all of those things to those who professed a belief in Jesus and who were strictly monogamous within a hetero-sexual marriage (to use the anachronistic term for what Paul could have known).  In so far as Paul did not do practice even-handedness in calling out such vices universally, attributing them only in association with same-sex, sex, he is in serious danger of inconsistency.  

I will point out that he never claimed to be infallible, nor that he was sinless. Nor that in reading him you can't find typical and flawed thinking. I have mentioned before that Timothy Luke Johnson, someone who David Bentley Hart acknowledged was a deep scholar of Paul even as he disagreed with his attribution of two or three of the disputed letters to Paul, pointed out that Paul had a really hard time whenever he broached the model of patriarchal familial relationships, in which those who had an exclusive orientation for same-sex sex could not fit though those who had sex with women, who married a woman who was their acknowledged wife but who had sex with, for example slaves, both female and male, with prostitutes (pagan temple or otherwise) children of both sexes (especially those who were enslaved) etc. things which a typical later Western Christian may not have any conception of but which were so common as to constitute the ambient gentile milieu in which those Paul addressed in his letters would find a constant temptation to slide back into was what Paul would have been addressing.  His lack of specificity in his letter is certainly a shorthand, perhaps choosing something which a presumed hetero-sexually oriented majority of those in receipt of it would find distasteful or strange as a means of reinforcing the list. If that's the case, he made his general point far more ineffective as the typical use of that passage to exclusively condemn same-sex sex proves.  I have never, once, seen it applied more generally when it is cited, if it has been used more generally to a general audience, I'd love to know the percentages of that general use as compared to the limited use of it to condemn same-sex sex, especially among those for whom few of the other items in Paul's list of evils apply. Especially among those whose commitment to one other person is a contradiction of his depiction of us.

I have read or heard a straight student of scripture who points out that when you expand this passage even farther, into what was designated in the early medieval period as "Chapter Two" that Paul seems to be making a far wider point about the sinfulness of us all, gentile pagans, gentiles believers in Jesus, Jewish believers in Jesus, Jews who didn't accept the status of Jesus. That Paul is consciously making a comparison to what he and his audience might consider "pagan gentile" sin with the sin of believers in Jewish monotheism, even those who rigorously observe The Law (which, famously or infamously, comes in for harsh treatment, or, rather, the arrogance that those who profess The Law).  Exactly after that passage quoted above, with its extensive list of evils that Paul adjudicates as "deserving of death," he proved that something far more complex is his what he is really talking about:

Chapter 2

1So you are without defense, O man—everyone who judges—for in that
you judge another you condemn yourself; because you who judge engage in the same practices.

Which, considering what Paul just said should make you think "Whooah! look who's talking!"  But he continues in something far more complex than the typical queer-bashing dogma and doctrine two-step:

2But we know that God’s judgment on those doing such things is in accord with truth. 3And do you, O man—you who judge those doing such things while also doing them—reckon that you will escape God’s judgment? 4Or do you disdain the abundance of his kindness and forbearance and magnanimity, ignorant that God’s kindness leads you to the heart’s transformation? 5Yet you store up indignation for yourself—in accord with your obduracy and impenitent heart—on a day of indignation and of a revelation of the just judgment of God, 6Who will requite everyone according to his deeds: 7To those who by perseverance in good work seek after glory and honor and incorruption—the life of the Age;d 8But to those of selfish ambition, who are also defiant of truth and yet compliant with injustice—indignation and vehemence. 9Distress and anguish upon the soul of everyone applying himself to what is evil—Judaean first, then Greek; 10But glory and honor and peace to everyone applying himself to what is good—Judaean first, then Greek. 11For with God there is no respecting of persons. 12For as many as have sinned without the Law will perish without the Law; and as many as have sinned within the Law will be judged by the Law; 13For those who hear the Law are not upright before God; rather doers of the Law will be proved upright. 14For, whenever gentiles who do not have a law do the things of the Law by nature, they who do not have Law are a Law to themselves: 15They who exhibit the work of the Law inscribed in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness with them, and the thoughts between one another making accusation or even offering defense 16On the day that, according to my good tidings, God judges men’s secrets through the Anointed One Jesus. 17But if you bear the name of Judaean and rely on Law and boast in God, 18And know what is willed, and attempt exceptional things, having received instruction from the Law, 19And having also persuaded yourself to be a guide to the blind, a light to those in darkness, 20An instructor of the foolish, a teacher of infants, having in the Law the very shape of knowledge and of the truth . . .

If it was not Paul's intention to note the equality in sin of hetero-sexuals and LGBTQ+ people - I doubt such a thing would have occurred to him, he almost certainly couldn't understand the issue in terms that are far more obvious to us- that is certainly a legitimate interpretation of what he said.  If the things he attributed to gay men and Lesbians are the things, the deeds that expose their personalities as sinful, then those are amply present in the monogamous, married hetero-sexual population and those who, like Paul, forego having sex.

21Do you who teach another not therefore teach yourself? You who preach not to steal, do you steal? 22You who say not to commit adultery, do you commit adultery?  You who abominate idols, do you rob temples? 23Do you who boast in the Law dishonor God by transgressing the Law? 24For “God’s name is blasphemed among the gentiles because of you,” as has been written. 25For circumcision does indeed have value if you happen to practice the Law; but if you happen to be a transgressor of the Law your circumcision has become a foreskin. 26If, therefore, “Foreskin” keeps the just requirements of the Law, will not his foreskin be reckoned as circumcision? 27And “Foreskin” (physically speaking), fulfilling the Law, will adjudge you—on account of scripture and circumcision—the transgressor of Law. 28For he is not a Judaean who appears to be so, neither is circumcision something apparent in the flesh —29Rather, the Judaean is one in secret, and circumcision is of the heart—in spirit, not letter—whose praise is not from human beings but from God.

I don't think it's possible to pluck a few sentences out of the incredible complex of argument and reason that Paul's letter to the Romans is to do it justice.  I think Paul did, in fact, think that men having sex with men and women having sex with women was wrong. It's as clear that his understanding of both kinds of sex was extremely limited, extremely one-side, extremely negative and in no way was it what I have advocated for either same-sex sex or hetero-sexual sex to avoid the status of sinfulness, that it is egalitarian, that it is a product of full, free and informed adult consent, that it is faithful and committed, that it is not done in a way that risks harm conscientiously considered.  I see no evidence that such a form of same-sex sex was imaginable by Paul or by any of the other authors of the infamous fewer than ten texts in Scripture that have been responsible for the violent, murderous, harmful and so evil oppression of LGBTQ+ People WHEN THOSE PASSAGES ARE DIRECTLY IMPLICATED IN THAT OPPRESSION.

I have been a victim of both actual violence against me as a gay man and as someone who was suspect of being gay and of intimidation on the off chance that someone may have thought it was possible I was gay. And that isn't to mention the general oppression and evil that comes from the general atmosphere of anti-LGBTQ+ bigotry and legalized discrimination such as Alito and Thomas, among other wish to return us to so soon after that was allegedly ended as "unconstitutional" by Supreme Court fiat.  

Even more than I know anything that Paul said is true, I know personally and experientially that inequality, of queer-bashers doing to others what they would never want done to them (as even Paul notes in this letter is rampant in the human population) is the fruit of such a perhaps ill considered passage written in a letter which later became called "the word of the Lord," a level of authority which Paul does not claim for his letter.  I claim the right to judge its validity on the basis of the Words of Jesus, of both his condensation of The Law and the Prophets and his own stated standard for judging the truth of religious claims made by others.  That would certainly include the never claimed to be infallible teachings of someone even as great as Paul.  Just as Paul's unfortunate phrasing in Phileomon was used to justify doing to slaves what the slave drivers and owners and others would never want the slaves to do to them, an evil of untold dimensions that Paul certainly never intended, so I will judge this passage not on Paul's unknowable intentions but by its consequence.

* Considering his description of what males having sex with other males are deviating from,  "abandoning natural use with the female, burned in their longing for one another, males performing shameful acts among males," his condemnation could be restricted to an imitation of hetero-sexual penetration, presumably, anal sex.  If that's the case, you have to wonder if he were not aware of hetero-sexual anal sex which was certainly not unknown to his contemporary pagans and Jews.  I don't know what the contemporary Jewish teachings about hetero-sexual anal sex were but I have read that even some of the most restrictive later Jewish teachings on in-marriage sex was that if the husband wanted anal sex he could engage in it without sin.  I don't know if how the wife felt about that mattered to the, no doubt all-male experts on the law felt about it.  I would certainly like someone who might be aware of such scholarship on that subject to steer me to it because it would certainly be relevant to understanding Paul's possible conception of sexual practices he professes he didn't participate in which I am fully prepared to believe him on.  I do know that there are contemporary Rabbis who say that the Law prohibits male-male anal sex but that other sexual practices are permitted between men, which, considering the dangers of infection and injury, isn't an unreasonable conclusion to come to though that is far, far short of demanding that the civil law allow violence and discrimination against men who engage in anal sex.

About The Disgrace Of The Union On Display Last Night

THE REPUBLICAN-FASCIST PARTY  is a Grand Guignol S&M production, a contest to see who can shaft the least among us the most.   Literally, in state-house after state-house, the McCarthy-Greene Congress,  the six Republican-fascist gangsters on the Supreme Court.  

The Republican-fascist Party is the Antichrist on full display and blatantly shitting on the Gospel and calling it "christianity."  

James Cone At Yale Divnity School - The Cry of Black Blood

 

A Requested Post - Part 1

And On Leveling Billionaires Out of Existence

WHAT IS THE RIGHT ROLE of Scripture in deciding how we conduct our lives, our relationships, our societies and our governments and legal systems?

How should we, as individuals, use Scripture to think about life, how we should act, how we should ask other people to act.  

Those are the bases on which my questioning of Scripture here starts.  

Should all of Scripture be given equal weight? - something which even those who pretend they believe it should never could possibly do in practice because Scripture is not always internally consistent and even the most second and third party precisian citers of Scripture are so frequently such notable insisters on first person indulgence. Since Scripture, by which I mean the canon of Scripture as adopted by churches and so forms the basis for our discussion of scripture, I'd include the books the Protestants leave out because I like some of the music written on texts from The Book of Wisdom.    

RMJ has requested a discussion of some of the issues I proposed wrapping up in the January 31st post which I'd like to get into, though right now a combination of health issues, computer issues and my limited connection to the internet will impede that. I've got a sick cat, too.  This is my fourth attempt to try to tighten up my response, every time I start that it grows and grows so I will just post this before I start on a fifth one. I will note that in this I am going far beyond the points raised by RMJ so as to explore one virtue, that of hospitality over what I say is a transcendent moral requirement of equality.

He rightly brings the issue of the ancient traditional (pre-Law)  virtue of hospitality to guests into the discussion, certainly that is in relation to my critical commentary on the folk-tale of Lot and the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. That is often used to explain his actions, which it can, though it also risks brushing aside the immorality of Lot offering his two daughters to what is not specifically mentioned though is almost universally taken to be a rape mob who want to rape Lot's two guests to whom he has offered hospitality, who just happen to be the very angels who God has sent to destroy the cities.

It is Lot's mention of the virginity of his daughters that is the strongest implication that the mob were a rape mob instead of a lynch mob though it also is a strong indication that no one, not Lot, not those who copied the stories and commented on them over thousands of years, understood them in the terms that identify them as gay men. He didn't offer them males from his household to rape, he offered females to them. From the text,  all anyone can know, he seems to know they were a straight men lynch mob who he was trying to turn into a straight rape mob.

When we, today, talk about gay marriage, gay equality, we are talking about something entirely different. Gay men, more to the point, in terms of the story, bi-sexual men who never do and never would act as part of such a violent mob are entirely innocent of the only identified sin of the men of the cities on the plane. Not that straight guys reading the stories have a clue as to that most obvious fact.  It has nothing to do with any modern egalitarian conception of LGBTQ+ rights.  It has far more in common with the notorious STRAIGHT gang rape scene in Last Exit To Brooklyn than it does to marriage equality. Yet its implications for strait sexual morality are not brought up no more than the directly corresponding sexual sins of straight men are ever attributed as being an intrinsic aspect of all straight sex even when the components of inequality and injustice are an obvious and customarily intrinsic aspect of permitted straight sex.   I would bet if anyone tried to make the gang rape of Tra La La into a point about straight sex the very same people would howl in objection.   They did object to Edward Albee's outside observer view of straight marriages in his work, which I'd certainly never use to characterize those in general.

I have nothing at all against making such mob behavior,straight or gay, a severely punished crime, nor do I the pedophile rape, temple prostitution, etc. which comprise most if not all of the other things condemned in most of scripture,  not least of all because it is a complete violation of equal rights. American law, ESPECIALLY AS ADMINISTERED IN THE VERY AREAS OF THE COUNTRY MOST OPPOSED TO EQUALITY, has, in fact, traditionally protected such mobs as long as they were comprised of straight, white men, even when they murdered their victims.  Anal sex between two consenting men is not an act without moral problems due to the increased likelihood of STDs and other harms arising from them but if it is consensual between adults it's no worse than the, by survey, far more common straight anal sex between men and women.  Not everything which is morally problematic should be the target of criminal laws.    Even when they were sworn officers of the law. In not a few cases even police officers get away with things like raping males with objects as a practical permission under the American legal system. Even more so in the long tradition of American lynch law. That is certainly not exclusive to the United States, though it is where I live so it is the primary focus of my comments.  As is reported from the Iranian gangsters who run that theocracy that lynches gay men from cranes as spectacle, it's OK when straight thugs from the clerical army does rapes Women abducted on the pretext of their "immorality."   But I'm not going to get into the use of such ancient stories and other Scripture under Islam because I haven't studied that  though from what I gather it is even more of an active means of slandering gay men than in most of the West. 

The fact is that even in other Scripture commenting on that story the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah is not anything like consensual sex between two adult males, and is, in every way, the opposite of two adult males who want to live in a faithful, loving, marriage as equal partners.  The fact is that such a marriage of equals which I assert is obviously morally superior to a marriage on the basis of gross, inevitably exploitative and almost as inevitably violent inequality, marriage inequality is explicitly presented as a model of straight marriage just about everywhere in human culture, even in Scripture. That is generally regarded in traditional understandings of scripture as unworthy of note, that is if the men who have had control of religion for so long were capable of noticing such injustice.   In one respect the movement for marriage equality has that advantage for same-sex marriages, that in the milieu in which it arises ideas of marriage as an equal relationship based in mutual love, respect, honest consent and fidelity are there as a model.  Without the equality of Women even considered as a possibility for the longest period of straight marriage, it has to overcome that custom and baggage to even be a moral undertaking.

Even Paul who may come closest in an explicit statement in Scripture to what I hold as the ideal straight marriage maintained it as an expression of inequality. Even as he laid down the requirement of husbands to love and respect their wives, he said wives must be obedient to their husbands without making that conditional on his instructions to husbands being fulfilled.  But, then, Paul was talking as an outsider when it came to both kinds of relationships.  He was unmarried.  And, really, it wouldn't have been fair for him to have a husband or wife, he was always away on the road.

If, as those who explain Lot's behavior on the basis of the virtue of hospitality present it, that understanding of hospitality overrides the morality of NOT handing your daughters over to a rape mob and the decisively righteous Lot, later, their father having sex with them and fathering children with them, then why can't we use our moral sensibility to object to that excuse on the basis of our placing of equality above such notions of hospitality?  Clearly, a better idea of hospitality would be contained within that virtue of equality while, it's clear from the stories, even subsidiary virtues such as  hospitality founded on inequality leads to all hell breaking loose. 

Perhaps it was that discreditable conception of hospitality in the general milieu of inequality that led to it becoming effectively discredited in those cities just as the discrediting hypocrisy of so much mainstream American Christianity has led to it being discredited in mainstream America.  Christianity to be credible now, and I think such credibility being given to the Gospel of Jesus is of the utmost importance, it has to carefully discard much of what has been held to be credible in the past.  And I think that a lot of the calls for that, such as those of the late John Shelby Spong are as bad if not worse than retaining such stuff as I object to.

I wonder how many times in the Bible it presents those on top providing hospitality to those below them other than in one of Jesus's more disturbingly ambiguous parables, the rather coerced hospitality of the rich guy forcibly requiring Street People to eat his feast when his rich friends snub him BUT THEY'D BETTER HAVE FASHIONABLE CLOTHES!  Biblical hospitality generally seems to start with something like a husband telling his wife to get cooking because he'd brought some guys home.

It is not uncommon to turn Scripture into an idol, to put it in the place of The Living God.  But the results of that are not good.  We can't have a dialogical covenental relationship with Scripture. Scripture may be said to speak but it sure the hell doesn't listen and consider your life and your experience. Putting Scripture up as a substitute for the experience of the Living God who is our God as much as God was the God of Abraham, Issac and Jacob is idolatrous. Abraham, Issac and Jacob had no Scripture that's mentioned in Scripture,* clearly their understanding of God was present in their experience of God, modified by their cultural backgrounds as that is reflected in Scripture, by the time it gets to us, no doubt modified to reflect changed cultural expectations of editors, compilers, copyists. The Old Testament is, in its entirety, a product of that process of transmission, far more so than the New Testament which had a far shorter period in which such a process was at work before it became canonized.  That process, in some cases, may have been an enriching one, not necessarily one making the results worse than "the original" - the nebulous view of what that original experience of God expressed in it seems to me to be far more open to ambiguity and getting it wrong. Though, as another piece I'm working on about the New Testament and the issue of wealth shows, even the clearest messages in Scripture can be almost universally obviously willfully  ignored.

Again, there is no pure, unfiltered written Scripture there is that human experience and observation which inevitably has human distortion built into it. That certainly doesn't make it worthless, no more than human science is worthless because, as modern physics discovered about a century ago and as is becoming ever more true as scientists test their previous assumptions about the "objectivity" of scientific method, all of science is inevitably a view of nature seen through the lens of human minds. That is so distorted that now, even from shortly after science became professionalized, "science" is often made about things that can't be seen at all or even observed through inference from things that can be seen and measured to things imagined up by those with a professional degree and a job.  If that is true of what can be seen with the eye, it is certainly more true of the God who cannot be seen and who created it all, including us with our capacity to do science and write Scripture.

Later, of course, those who first assembled the Book of Genesis and the rest of the First Testament Scriptures, had Scripture as part of their cultural and intellectual background but their work certainly had other components worked into it based on their background and personal experience which influenced the choices that gave us the texts in the versions that still exist in old manuscripts and those of those which were used to assemble the canonical Scriptures in use today, the Masoretic Texts used by today's Rabbinical Judaism and, often quite differently used, by especially Protestant and some Catholic translators and the Old Testament of the Greek speaking tradition, the Septuagint so influential in the original compilations of Christian Scripture, Orthodox and Catholic.

The vision of God thousands of years ago which we can have any kind of access to today is not the Living God but the written accounts of their experience of the Living God as have come down to us often modified by many later hands.  In that our own most honest attempts, our careful attempts, our highly self-questioning and critically evaluated attempts at that kind of dialogical relationship with God, based primarily in our own moral consciences and informed by what of Scripture we decide to take as applicable (often having to lay aside contradicting passages) is what we can have as a direct dialogical relationship with God.  Putting Scripture ahead of that is as likely to lead to disaster as getting it wrong within that back and forth of consulting our consciences.  You're taking chances, either way.

What we conclude on the basis of the witness of the evils of chattel slavery, wage slavery, destitution of those the economy can't profit from,  the evils of Womens' subjugation, the Shoah and other modern, industrial genocides, environmental destruction as the way of death and overriding evils are certainly what led me and I hope others to see equality as the overriding moral position in so far as that is discernible to us, in our lives, with our experience, in view of human history, in social interactions, civil laws and government today.  

It is certain from the texts that such a view and experience of human life doesn't much at all appear in Genesis, it starts appearing with the Mosaic Law but which, as Jesus said, was sometimes a presentation of justice in which hardness of human hearts could win out over justice. It was a monumental step ahead in perceiving absolute moral law, it was not the last step.  I now understand why the Yigdal asserts that Moses was the greatest of the Prophets, twenty years ago I didn't get that at all.  But I still believe Jesus was right in his far more radical view of things. It is his assertion of the Law and Prophets summed up in one rule that I put my entire faith in.

It's clear that whatever the absolute and eternal moral LAW of God is that human awareness of it is developing and human commission of that LAW is not soon going to accomplish it. Though the Lord's Prayer instructs us to always strive for it, a prerequisite for the Kingdom of God to appear on Earth.  I hold that as the movements for equality have been developing, so slowly, too slowly developing till the present and beyond, it has become clear that acting equally is a fundamental Law of humanly performed morality.  

Far from the secularly imaginary absolute "freedom" that my age cohort loved to imagine would lead us to heaven on Earth, it was the less popularly sought (at least among middle-class and affluent white lefties and hippies) equality that would get us farther and be far more effective in achieving a real freedom, a human covenant of the kind of dialogical freedom with moral responsibilities that Walter Brueggemann talked of in our relations with the Relational God of the Bible.

As an aside, the ease with which the language of the secular left has become the slogans of Trump-era Neo-fascism and Neo-Nazism, especially when "freedom" is one of the words shows that there was something dangerously wrong with that conception of boundless freedom, one which was nurtured by the decidedly secularist ACLU and secular liberals on earlier Supreme Courts.  The consequences of that understanding of "freedom" has come home to roost in the ACLU with the conflicts of many lawyers, especially those of Color who see the consequences of the dogmatic "free speech-press" work of the older,far less endangered, mostly but not entirely white lawyers and leaders of that organization.  The cowardly, irresponsible view of such "freedoms" in the abstract as comprising a virtue above and beyond the actual equality and lives of People of Color and other targets of Republican-fascism, the indigenous American fascism of white supremacy, should definitively discredit that conception of "freedom" as a self-destructing academic fantasy.

Lately I am thinking of how the all mighty secular sanctity placed on the legal notions of secular contract law, given as the basis of so much judicial blessing of grossly unjust inequality might help to understand the scrupulosity (as opposed to morality) of such things as hospitality in a medium of gross inequality but haven't gotten far in testing that suspicion I've had while looking critically at Genesis, Joshua, Judges,etc. I don't know if my never taking classes in Scripture or the civil law is a hindrance or not.

More directly on topic:

In our time the static injustice meted out to Women in the time of the Patriarchs has only started to give way on the way towards equality. In our time the even more difficult, taken for granted, inequality based on race and ethnicity and religion has merely started to be overturned in favor of equality with Republican-fascists, fascists in other lands, etc. in full backlash against that progress.  And in our time the ancient injustice against LGBTQ+ people has also been questioned and fought against, I will say informed by and inspired by the experience of our often violent inequality, the fear we have lived in, the oppressive inequality we have legally suffered under and also inspired by the struggles of the other Civil Rights movements and the testimony of our fellow sufferers from inequality.  The struggle for LGBTQ+ People would never have gotten as far as it has if it wasn't part of those more general movements demanding equality.

Behind all of that, for all of the many ironies that the source of those brings, is the basis of The Law and the Prophets, that we are to do to others what we would want them to do to us. That law reaches all the way down even into oppressed groups.  That law is as binding; for example, on gay men in relationships and sexual encounters as it is for those who would like to treat us unequally.

It is a Law of God that, if applied as a basis of law,  not only should govern legal and social oppression out of permitted existence but it should also govern the relationships of gay men, Lesbians, etc. even when full legal equality is achieved. For obvious reasons,   If it isn't then all we will do is recreate the evils of inequality within gay life.  I would assert that the moral requirement on gay men, those of us who accept that as the basis of our sexual, marital relationships AND OF OUR RELATIONSHIPS WITH OTHER PEOPLE is a solid justification and vindication of our right to full equality.  I am thinking of the quaint times forever ended when a Republican President, Nixon, instead of MLK style equality promoted some fantasy called "Black capitalism" which would have helped a small sub-overclass, not produced equality or democracy.

That equality is a sound hermenutical basis for reading the Scriptures which so often fall short of that moral absolute, the absolute articulated by Jesus and Hillel as constituting the entire basis of Scripture. The hospitality of Lot, of others, the abuse and use of Women in that framing of hospitality, Women, slaves etc. often being excluded from the protection of hospitality (neither hosts nor guests considered the daughters or the Levite's sex-slave as being protected by it EVEN BY THE TWO ANGELS!, though maybe they did tell Lot to stop being such a jerk and it didn't make it into the text) is a sound basis to impeach the use of those stories as written and so many others as setting the basis of our morality or the laws and social practices of us today. The moral failure of Lot and his guests, of Lot later in the story are as noteworthy as the implied immorality of the lynch mob WHOSE INTENTIONS ARE NEVER EXPLICITLY SPELLED OUT, though I have never read even a modern commentary that mentions the rules of hospitality as motivating the behavior of Lot have really considered the horror of what the good guys are prepared to do to uphold that custom.  It makes you wonder what would have happened if the angels had spent the night on the town square instead of in Lot's house.

Let me remind you, I have said I think the story is a folk-tale retold, not anything like an actual crime report.

Other parts of Scripture, especially when taken as an aspiration to be achieved later, don't have those same problems attached to them. It's kind of funny how, due to its usefulness to materialists and atheists, the least difficult part of Genesis is the part that generates the most controversy, the 6-day Creation fable.  That some of the worst statements in scripture are contained in some of the most valuable books of Scripture, Leviticus, Deuteronomy, Romans, Corinthians, doesn't either validate those passages nor does it invalidate the good in those Books. If we conducted our societies on the egalitarian commandments in the Books of Moses and the Prophets we might mistake it as being heaven on Earth, instead the worst and most violent passages have been enforced with the power of law up to and including state murder while those demanding provision to the destitute, the abandoned woman, the orphan, the alien among us made illegal by law, are reversed to legally sanctify that inequality. Secular governments, even those led by "Most Christian Monarchs"  seldom and never finally do much else but discredit Christianity when they dabble in Scripture to come up for religious justifications of what they'd have done if they never found that justification.

Though, even as that common elision of scripture is their actual practice, the absolutist modern mind holds such an absurd "all or nothing" notion of evaluation of Scripture, it is the very basis of the corrupt modern heresy of Biblical Fundamentalism. And Biblical Fundamentalists are among the most flagrant violators of The Law and the Prophets.  In 2023 America, those who proclaim Christianity the loudest are the actual Antichrist on full display in our decadent city on the plain but which imagines it's on a hill.

Any attempt to substitute an impossible literalist reading of Scripture to represent the Living God in OUR current dialogical relationship with the Living God seems to me to turn sacred Scripture, itself, into an idol. Usually, except to pick out a sentence or two for that moral condemnation which is always second and third, never first person, their idol is a closed book, such as Trump held upside down in his photo-op publicity pose.  

That idolatry is rampant in American Christianity, right-wing Protestant, trad-Catholic (they add an ahistorical and distorted assertion of the Magisteria into it,so long as someone says it in Latin which almost none of them can read).  We have no honest choice but to fight these things out in our own informed, honestly questioned, honestly doubted and provisionally accepted moral consciences.  We all have to wrestle with God, we all have to take chances of being wrong but the possibility of doing that on the basis of equal justice and how we would want others to treat us will probably get us more right than more wrong more often.

Trying to understand where Lot, Abraham,etc. were coming from is one thing, understanding their notions of hospitality can help us understand that, it can help us understand and evaluate the meaning of those texts. But Scripture is about more than that academic exercise. The grotesque inequality that was included in their conception of morality rightfully leads to the conclusion that what they thought is rightly suspect to be anything from inadequate to being entirely wrong when it comes to informing our judgment and our conduct. Any subsequent commentary or religious doctrine or dogma which does not contain an effective critique of that inequality and, so, injustice, is at best inadequate and, not infrequently, all-in on injustice.

I'm not interested in this as from an intellectual, anthropological view, I'm in it for what it can do to save our skins AND OUR SOULS.  My experience as a gay white Irish Catholic man born in New England in the middle of one of the most violent centuries, the 20th century, was witness to the struggles for Women's equality, the Civil Rights struggles, the myriads of crimes of inequality and injustice, the struggle for economic justice, the violence of predatory capitalism and the monumental murder oppression and theft of gangster governments from the worst, Nazism, Maoism, Stalinism,... to the nominal, generally corrupt, liberal democracies, the addle-brained counter-productive,  self-discrediting and so, the in-effect non-opposition to that of secular, materialist, "humanist" lefties and liberals, leads me to the kind of Christianity I have chosen to believe in, a Christianity that can question Scripture and even Saint Paul on the basis of the Golden Rule and the by their fruits you will know them test. For me, notably, the Jesus of the Gospels passes those tests, the testimony of James does, Paul usually does, much of The Law and the Prophets do.  And those are exactly the parts that just about all of the Christian conservatives and so many Christian liberals have the least use for. And secularists are quite unreliable on them, as well.

I, as a gay man seeing and directly experiencing the fruits of even so much use of scripture know it has produced evil even as other parts of scripture has informed and inspired the effective opposition to that evil.  I conclude from that the idea that all Scripture is valid, all Scripture is authentically inspired, all Scripture rightfully is given force to determine our conduct and laws is a lie.  

I acknowledge that asserting that carries dangers of cutting out exactly that which I think is certainly inspired but not making those distinctions already has produced discrediting monumental evil. It hasn't been a frivolous or half-hearted effort to get to this position.  It has been informed by what I know as intimately as I know my own experience as examined by my best efforts of critical moral conscience.  I don't see the slightest indication that our opponents in favor of inequality and discrimination and oppression and, yes, murder have done anything like that, from the rankest, stupidest member of the Republican-fascist caucus in the McCarthy House to the most elevated members of clergies and legal priesthoods, they are not credible, they're a disgrace.

* I wonder if that's the reason that Scripture asserts that God appeared in person to the Patriarchs because there was an absence of written Scripture for them to get ideas from. For some reason they never include Sarah in that list of those said to have talked directly to God in person though Scripture said not only she but Hagar did, as well.  Wonder why that might be the case.  In Hagar's case, God promised her, directly something much like what he promised Abraham.  Though that's probably just me imagining stuff that isn't explicitly said in the text.  Such as centuries and millennia of such inserted imagination is imagined to be in the texts.  I have to say, even my primitive level of deeper reading so as to translate Scripture has been a revelation of what it says and what it doesn't say.  A lot of what it does say is extremely jarring and often disturbing, things I never noticed just reading the texts over and over again.  I'd recommend everyone who can try it. It's a real help to forcing yourself to think more deeply about it.

NOTE:  Putting It All Out There

In the secular aspect of the struggle for equality it has sometimes been claimed that the struggles for equal rights is "not a zero-sum game" in which those who were unprivileged getting equality would not take anything away from those on top of them in law, in society, in the economy but that isn't true and the opponents of equality know it.  Thus nothing less than a command from God for the privileged to give up their excess of wealth and power, their superior position, will get us to it.

It is stupid to think the opposition to equality isn't highly motivated by the truth that equality will come with the economic, social and legal loss of privileges for those on the top, affluent, straight, white males and such Women as are an auxiliary part of their privileged class.  

The anodyne claims made to the privileged by civil libertarians ignored that the very privilege enjoyed by them came at the expense of those on the bottom and, also those in the middle classes, costs unequally extracted from those not on top.  The money today's billionaires have was extracted from those on the bottom, many of them held in virtual slavery in the Third World, in China, in such communist paradises as North Korea, etc. And right here in the United States.

The structure of inequality is fractile in nature, making sub hierarchies in which middle-class straight, white men were above middle-class straight white women and People of Color in the middle class, all of those above while in those lower levels being given some stake in maintaining the legal, social and governmental system that assigned them a lesser place. The evil genius of America used racism as one of it's most potent bribes to lower class White People so they would kick ever down, not up where their real oppressors were.

It's not easy to see who are the ones on bottom, though I would think that Transgender Women of Color, especially those in the underclass might be suspected of being very low in all such rankings. The murder rate of any identifiable group is probably an indicator of who is lower and who is higher. Even with all the determination to struggle for equality among us, Gay white men of affluence are certainly above LGBTQ+ people of less affluence, poverty and destitution.  Money has the effect of putting one's status higher, protecting a Lindsay Graham even in that bastion of LGBTQ+ hatred, South Carolina and among the DC Press Corps who daintily maintain an in the closet code that protects such hypocrites. That is the true genius of the American system as set up under the Constitution in maintaining inequality and discrimination and the violent enforcement of inequality. And that is far from exclusively true of the United States, it is reproduced around the world.

The fact is that privilege at every level of possession cannot be retained under equality, a true egalitarian democracy would be had only to the extent that all of those privileges were leveled out of existence under an era of general equality of rights without privileges, each one having the same freedoms as the other because they respect the freedoms and rights of others. And those are not only inequalities of material possessions and physical status.  I will recall, again, the time someone on a lefty blog slammed me as an elitist because I made a comment about "classical music" that my elitism consists of not being satisfied until everyone is elite. The needed equality will have to iron flat the attitudes of superiority that our academic institutions and media teach such as the false assumption that something mistaken to be "ritzy" as classical music is the rightful property of some elite. That is the depth of the poisons of privilege we are brought up in.  These levelings are, I think, an absolute requirement before "Thy Kingdom come" because it is "Thy Will be done on Earth as it is in heaven."  Heaven as can be understood in human terms must be an absolute leveling of all of us under the perfect Love of God for God's created creatures. Paul said that the Gospel was that "all flesh will see God." Which is certainly a vision that surpasses human understanding in this life but we are called to approximate that to the best of our abilities. Its theological consequences are far, far more general if you believe that is the true nature of reality.

Motivated by another thing that David Bentley Hart said in his commentary accompanying his translation of the New Testament I am working on another piece about the role of wealth in Scripture wishing that I had access to Walter Brueggemann's fairly recent work on that topic, no doubt he knows decades study worth more about what I'll get about it.

In regard to what we are to take from the earliest Scriptures in light of the Gospel, Paul, James, etc. in Genesis the wealth of the Patriarchs and their families, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, etc. is presented as morally unproblematic whereas Jesus, Paul, James, etc. are unambiguous in identifying wealth as if it were a deadly sin guaranteed to risk damnation. If you take Jesus seriously it is impossible not to address that difference and to take it to heart. I'll go with what Jesus said about that, not Genesis.