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.
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