I HAVE BEEN INTENDING to transcribe at least some of that talk by Cheryl Anderson I posted the Youtube of last weekend like I have other talks by other people. That is because it is so full of ideas important to real, practical life and politics and Christianity as it will have to be to continue in service to The Living God acting through us. For the Gospel of Jesus to survive even Christianity. I also had been thinking of transcribing a talk that Luke Timothy Johnson gave in 2011 centering on six assumptions he made when dealing with Scripture which intersects with what Cheryl Anderson said on a number of points. Both of them addressing LGBTQ+ life within the Church.
Over the past week, for some reason, I seem to be stumbling across exhortations about trusting in The Living God From Cheryl Anderson back to George MacDonald and even farther back into the New Testament. The living God makes God's mind known to us not only in Scripture, the revelation of the Living God in the experience of People thousands of years ago, but in our own lived experience in our time. I'm starting to wonder if someone's trying to tell me something.
Luke Timothy Johnson makes two points near the start of his talk, that if that idea of depending on our own experience instead of "Scripture alone" makes us nervous we should understand that we, as everyone else always has, does that. Especially Christians should already have fits of nerves because a. no one who read the Scriptures available to the earliest followers of Jesus, the Jewish Scriptures, would have expected the Messiah to be an executed criminal of the first century raised from the dead. b. he makes the point repeatedly that there was nothing less "Biblical" for the earliest followers of Jesus who were uniformly Jews to include gentiles in the community that started to become Christianity, especially gentiles who did not follow The Law of Moses. That is something which almost certainly came before any of the books of the New Testament were written because in the earliest of those written by Paul and James comes after he and his colleagues started evangelizing gentiles and whatever is based on even earlier traditions that were written as the Gospels comments on the novelty of the idea that Jesus seems to have occasionally included or commented on the worthiness of non-Jews who believed him and in him. I do have to wonder if that idea might be a bigger problem for Protestants with that "Scripture alone" normative standard standing over so many of them.
I have decided to start with Cheryl Anderson because she speaks more directly to my own experience and it's harder to find her books or other writing than those who I have already used in these posts. I will probably dip into Johnson's talk where he commented on similar points as that occurs to me.
It all started when I was teaching a Bible Study class with high school students who were going to be seniors that fall. I was told to teach them what I teach at the seminary level, not to baby it down for them but to actually give them the kind of questions that seminary students have to grapple with.
So I was saying that there are problematic texts in the Bible. For instance, the 10 Commandments that we love so much accept slavery, Judges 19 basically says it's better to rape a woman than a man. And there was this one African American teenager sitting in that class who did not like the direction of the conversation. So she started to hum to kind of drown me out. It's one of the reasons I never work with youth groups. You know. It's one of these things, I'm used to seminary students where the "Dr."' kind of makes them, you know, have some respect. For teenagers it's like, "Naw!" So this teenager started to hum and I kept talking, you know, over her hum. And finally she had just had enough and she said, "This is the Word of God. If it says slavery is okay, slavery is okay. If it says rape is okay, rape is okay."
I was shocked because I had always assumed that if you're African American you would question the Biblical support for slavery, I had assumed that if you're a female or a decent human being you would question the acceptance of rape. I just assumed that would happen.
And then I realized that I had read Audrey Lorde in seminary, The Sister Outsider which I strongly recommend and her work has already been referred to here. And she talks about the mythical norm. And it's the normative human experience and she argues that normative human experience doesn't really cover all human beings. It basically covers white heterosexual males who are also privileged or affluent. There are other aspects to it but for my purposes I limit it to those four because those four really help me to put my own work into context.
Now, let me say at the outset that if you are a white heterosexual male and affluent, I ain't talking about you, specifically. I'm talking about systemically, historically, institutionally. So that these things, these traditions stay in place whether or not there are even human beings involved because they become the ethos of a tradition or an approach.
And so what I realized from that young teenager is that she had been taught to read the Bible from a particular perspective. And it happened to be this perspective that sort of grounds this particular so-called normative experience.
Now I say "so-called normative" because my question is, yes, it may be the church tradition to interpret texts in this way but I always ask how many people were there when they were developing this tradition or this particular interpretation who look like me. And not only that but who were woke Black Women. Because that's not the same thing either. So, yes, I'm challenging these traditions, I'm challenging these interpretations because they simply aren't representative of all of humanity.
I am more and more impressed with Cheryl Anderson's thinking and scholarship the more I listen and read.
Years ago, I think it was when I wrote for Echidne of the Snakes, that I noticed that white males, middle-class or above were universally considered the "default" of human beings, males in general a world-cultural default, and that any even notice of or regard or respect paid to anyone else was likely to be understood as some kind of privilege unfairly being granted to those others who were tacitly assumed to not deserve that. More generally, that happens whenever someone with an expectation of privilege sees soemone else getting what they figure is theirs by default, what is generally miscalled "by right." Women, of course, Black People and People of Color, of course, other minorities are held to be given respect or anything, really, unfairly.
Sometimes I included LGBTQ+ as falling outside that default, though I always admitted that many, probably most gay men who were white and had money could enjoy many of the privileges of that default, though not usually if they insisted on living honestly and authentically. If Lindsay Graham suddenly admitted he was and always had been an active homosexual it would be interesting to see the extent to which he was allowed to retain the level of privilege he has been giving by queer-bashers. Though affluence even for out of the closet white gay men can go a long way in the preservation of privilege. I agree with Cheryl Anderson that there are many other factors involved in how that plays out in individual lives. Rich white women, rich Black People and other members not included in that default of privilege can, if they choose to or don't actively reject that, enjoy it to some extent. Poor, marginalized members of subjugated and oppressed minority groups are certainly the least likely to escape the meaner aspects of that hierarchy.
She, of course, speaking to an admirably inclusive and conscious LGBTQ+ group which seems to largely be Christian Evangelical in its membership, focuses on the consequences of maintaining the authority of that "normative" reading AND I'LL INCLUDE WRITING of Scripture and in the Christian tradition which is still so influential in churches and in our thinking about these things. But it is no less true in any other aspect of our cultures, that of politics, academics, science, especially the life sciences and the pseudo-social sciences, and all aspects of popular culture, including journalism. I think her thinking is extremely useful in understanding a lot about that, as well as about some of the most destructive things still present in Christianity.
The statement by Luke Timothy Johnson I paraphrase in the title came from that talk he gave dealing with sex, the Bible and Christianity. He said in it.
So, Scripture is everywhere authoritative for me as a theologian. I am liberal in the name of Scripture rather than liberal over/against Scripture. I take it as the plainest reading of the meaning of Scripture to hold positions that are liberative in our lives. But Scripture, although always authoritative, that is to say always speaking as the inspired Word of God and challenging us in our perceptions of the world is not always normative for what we do here and now. To pretend otherwise is simply to have false consciousness. It is to lie either to ourselves or to others.
That was said before he noted that if the earliest Christians had not allowed their own experience of The Living God to override the letter of Scripture as they and probably all of the Hebrew traditional understanding of Scripture thought of it, they could never have held that Jesus rose from the dead and was Lord, they could never have felt moved to include gentiles as is so controversially presented in Acts - another of the coincidences mentioned above is that even as I randomly clicked on those two talks last weekend, that passage was in the lectionary read at Catholic masses over several days.
I will interject that Jesus notably said he was not going to overturn a letter of The Law, that is the Mosaic Law AS HE, HIMSELF PRESENTED IT IN THE GOLDEN RULE, something that Hillel seems to have agreed with him on. He certainly overturned a good deal of the previous interpretation and even the letter of Scripture, including things like the permission in The Law, allowing husbands to divorce their wives, the stoning of Women who committed adultery, violating the Sabbath to do good works, etc.
Another of the things I started reading this week was George MacDonald's Unspoken Sermons. I'd like to go into those as they relate to the overriding and authoritative experience of the Living God to but not until this project is complete. It's going to take a while. I seem to do a lot better when I'm doing a series these days, so that's what I'm sticking to. Hate mail responses will have to wait, maybe indefinitely.
No comments:
Post a Comment