All Souls Day

The passage posted here yesterday continues:

From the beginning, Christians have shared the conviction that they were "called to be saints" (Rom. 1:7; 1 Cor. 1"2), to move through this transformation into the image of Jesus through the power of the Holy Spirit that came from Jesus himself as risen Lord.  Furthermore, they have believed that this transformation means enacting, in the circumstances specific to their own lives, the same pattern of obediential faith in God and self-giving service to others that was demonstrated by Jesus, so that as he moved through suffering to glory, so also -- through participation in his Spirit - would they progress.

From the beginning, Christians have shared the conviction that "the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ" by which they are saved (Acts 15:11; Rom. 5:15; Eph. 2:5) is more than simply a "favor" don them by God; rather, it is in some real sense a "gift" that enables them to share the very life of God through the Spirit that comes to them from Jesus.  This gift, furthermore, is not simply potential but actual:  "Hope is not shamed, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us" (Rom. 5:5).  The process of transformation in holiness therefore is taking place within human freedom as it opens itself to the freedom by the Spirit of the Lord (2 Cor. 3:17-18).  

The understanding within the tradition that there are "saints" in whom the pattern of Jesus the Messiah and Lord can be discerned with particular clarity is an acknowledgment of the reality of grace and willingness to give glory to God - that is, to recognize the presence and power of God at work in the world.  That understanding was an early element in Christian consciousness  Already in Ignatius of Antioch we find a disciple who faced martyrdom with the clear understanding that this path of witnessing to God unto death was a literal following in the way of Jesus.  And those friends of Polycarp, bishop of Smyrna, who reported his death at the hands of the authorities also showed that their rendering of his martyrdom that they understood it to be an imitation of Jesus' loving sacrifice for others in obedience to God. 

The heart of the Christian tradition is in fact the living succession of holy persons who have been transformed by the Holy Spirit of Jesus.  Tradition is not simply the transmission of facts and norms; it is above all the communication of life and identity.  And it is through the saints 0 those who have been transformed by the power of the resurrected Jesus - that the tradition has been enlivened. Some saints have been public figures within the church and within society;  their example has been seen by all, their influence obvious.  Other saints have been virtually anonymous, known only to a few  (and some perhaps only to God); their example and  influence are more subtle, though no less real.

"Perhaps only to God,"  perhaps not even to themselves.  I think there are lots of saints who never heard of Jesus or the Holy Spirit or the Bible or if they had, don't think about those much.   The Jewish New Testament Scholar Amy Levine, when asked about whether or not she is afraid of being damned for not believing in the status of Jesus as the Risen Lord or he Messiah she pointed to the end of Mark 25,  a great and famous  passage which, through an ancient mistranslation, has caused no end of evil, especially in the Western Church, especially in the modern period starting with the Reformation and Counter-Reformation.  I'll give it to you in the second edition of David Bentley Hart's translation of the New Testament. 

And when the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the [holy] angles with him, then he will sit on his throne of glory; and all the nations will be assembled before him, and he will separate them from one another, as the shepherd separates the sheep from the kid goats, and will set the sheep to his right, and the kid goats to his left. 

I have to break into this to point out something which so many who have read this passage miss,  Jesus was using a simile from the everyday life of some in the lowest economic stratum of his milieu, "as the shepherd separates the sheep from the kid goats."  So much of the misunderstanding of Scripture comes through a too close to literal misunderstanding of rhetorical language.   Jesus was communicating things that can't really be told directly in human language to human understanding so metaphors and similes and symbols have to suffice.  

And that is even more of a problem in much of Paul's writing where he uses far more complicated rhetorical language to make his arguments.   Paul's rhetorical method is ill served by the modern punctuation of chapter and verse.  

But that's only the first problem which has come to us.   For me, the idea that goat kids are somehow more wicked than sheep is a problem,  they're more rambunctious, but they're some of the most charming animals of my experience.   

Then the King will say to those to his right, 'Come, you blessed by my Father, inherit the Kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the cosmos  For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you gave me hospitality, naked and you clothed me, I was ill and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to me.'  

Then the just will answer him, saying, "Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink?  And when did we see you a stranger and give you hospitality, or naked and clothe you?   

And in reply the King will say to them, 'Amen, I tell you inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.'   

Then he will say to those to the left, 'Go from me, you execrable ones, into the fire of the Age prepared for the Slanderer and his angels.   For I was hungry and you did not give me anything to eat, I was thirsty and you did not give me drink, naked and you did not clothe me, ill and in prison and you did not look after me.'  

Then they too will answer, saying,  'Lord, when did we see you hungry, or thirsty, or a stranger, or naked or ill or in prison, and did not attend you?'  

Then he will answer them, saying, "Amen, I tell you, inasmuch as you did not do it to one of the least among these my brothers, neither did you do it to me.'  And these will go into the chastening* of that Age, but the just to the life of that Age.

You may not notice, as so many don't, that that passage makes no reference to faith in Jesus as the Messiah as sufficient for salvation (no matter what Luther, Calvin and others claimed) or even as a requirement for salvation.   It refers to salvation through doing good to the least among us, the alien, the hungry, thirsty, sick, imprisoned,  something which I dare say large numbers of those who profess a belief in Jesus Christ entirely ignore and in so many cases, deplore.  That is a characteristic of the most public of those in America who proclaim their Christianity while being ICE supporting, racist, political, billionaire serving financial ideological christianists.   I have no doubt that they put themselves into the category Jesus called "execrable."  By their own claims, they are with those to the left of the throne and are on their way to correction.  

Amy Levine notes her long service in working with and for prisoners as qualifying her as a "lamb" and, as I mentioned yesterday,  I know of infidels who reject Christianity who fulfill at least part if not all of those qualifications listed in this key passage.   It is remarkable, since those who are of that tendency put this passage to so much use to promote the idea of eternal damnation, in many cases, the eternal damnation of  the large majority of humanity, including infants who died unbaptized and, in the worst of Calvinists, for example, even many babies who are baptized, it would seem, they so notably reject that which would get them a place to the right. 

In DBH's postscript to his translation in which he writes about his translation of certain controversial or difficult words, in regard to this passage and a few others,  he says 

The first word is aionios, which in most traditional translations is rendered as "eternal" or "everlasting," [as in eternal damnation or everlasting fire] except in the many instances where such a reading would be nonsensical.  And I have discovered that there are many Christians whose sometimes furious objection to any other rendering revolves around a single verse, Matthew 25:46 [ The last sentence talking about "the chastening of that Age.]  After all, in the original Greek of the New Testament, there really are only three verses that seem to threaten "eternal punishment" for the wicked (though, in fact, none of them actually does),  and many who are doctrinally or emotionally committed to the idea of eternal torment for the unelect would feel gravely bereaved if the delicious clarity of the seemingly most explicit of those verses were allowed to be obscured behind a haze of lexical indeterminacy.  To these I can say only that, if they really wish to believe in everlasting torment of the reprobate, they are perfectly free to do so, whether there is any absolutely unquestionable scriptural warrant for doing so or not;  but, then again, even the Greek word rendered as "punishment" in that verse arises problems of translation . . . he then refers to the footnote I typed out blow.  

He goes on for a number of pages making a very convincing argument for his universalist interpretation of that which, if had been done right by Jerome and the other early translators into Latin, might have saved Christianity, especially western Christianity, from more than fifteen hundred years of enthrallment to what in the Baptism rite is called the "glamour of evil."  Because it is clear that much of even the churches are enthralled by their meditations on hell, damnation, various species of devils and those they love to imagine as damned.  It doesn't get more evil or glamour stricken than those images which saturate European and American culture.  The evil which flows from that is seen in the current christianist plague that, well, plagues us now.  Especially among the "evangelicals and reformed" though not all of them. 

I believe all souls will be united with God, there are scores of Scripture passage that have been cited to support that belief while the eternal damnation preference really comes up entirely short in that tally.  And, as DBH says, it is based on faulty translations and understandings of the original language of the New Testament.  And when I say all souls, I mean all creatures which possess souls, which I am certain includes the animals and, in ways I can't claim to understand, trees, plants, etc.   The more complex science reveals the "simplest" organisms to be, the more obvious it is that there is cognition happening in the simplest one-cell organisms, the more universal salvation makes sense to me. 

* The mistranslation on which a huge amount of the eternal-damnation dogma and doctrine and bloodthirsty assertion hangs comes from the description of the assignment of the "goats" to in the Latin translation as "eternal" when the word in Greek meant of an indistinct but eventually ending term.  In his footnote on that point  the fluent Greek scholar and classicist, as well as theologian and philosopher David Bentley Hart says:

The word kolasis, originally meant "pruning" or "docking" or "obviating the grown" of trees or other plants, and then came to mean "confinement," "being held in check," "punishment," or "chastisement,' chiefly with the connotation of "correction."   Classically, the word was distinguished (by Aristotle, for instance) from timoria, which means a retributive punishment only.  Whether such a distinction holds here is difficult to say, since by late antiquity kolasis seems to have been used by many to describe punishment of any kind;  but the only other use of the noun in the New Testament is in 1 John 4:18, when it refers not to retributive punishment, but to the suffering experienced by someone who is subject to fear because not yet perfected in charity.  The word form kolazo appears twice; in Acts 4:21, where it clearly refers only to disciplinary punishment and in 2 Peter 2:9 in reference to fallen angels and unrighteous men, where it probably means "being held in check" or "penned in" [until the day of judgement].