Myths and Doctrine

I was in Toronto this weekend past, and so I didn’t get a chance to write my weekly meditation on the lectionary texts. But I happened to notice that today was the Feast of St. Peter & St. Paul (transferred in the Anglican tradition). And so, with supper tonight, I dug around in the texts and found the following:

For the time is coming when people will not put up with sound doctrine, but having itching ears, they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own desires, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander away to myths.

I don’t want to delve into which is which, or which idea may be “true” and which one “false”. But I think it interesting that the Greek words for “myth” and “doctrine” both refer to oral teachings:

mythos is “a speech, word, saying, a narrative, story.” didaskalias is a “teaching, instruction”.

But we are to like one and reject the other. We are warned about people who reverse those.

I find it interesting to note that, for some, it is stories of God, at all, that are “just myths”. For others conservative theology is based on “myths” which are taken as literal truths. For still a different groups of people, it is those who accept fabulous tales or miracles and the like that are following myths. For St Paul it’s possible that the words of St Luke’s Gospel, combining stories of Jesus with ancient, Pagan stories, were mythological.

Again, I don’t need to get into which is which: but it’s clearly a case of cultural identification. When the one side of an argument says the other is following myths - we need to know where the author gets his definitions. In the case of this writing in 2 Timothy, we instead read in our own understanding - and we do so at great peril.

Not Peace but a Sword

Take a look at the RCL readings for tomorrow, Proper 7, Year A. They are some of the tough ones.

But Sarah saw the son of Hagar the Egyptian, whom she had borne to Abraham, playing with her son Isaac. So she said to Abraham, “Cast out this slave woman with her son; for the son of this slave woman shall not inherit along with my son Isaac.”

“Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.

“For I have come to set a man against his father,
and a daughter against her mother,
and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law;
and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household.

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Hospitality

This Sunday’s (yesterday’s) reading from the Revised Common Lectionary (for Proper 6, Year A) included the passage recounting “The Hospitality of Abraham.”

The LORD appeared to Abraham by the oaks of Mamre, as he sat at the entrance of his tent in the heat of the day. He looked up and saw three men standing near him. When he saw them, he ran from the tent entrance to meet them, and bowed down to the ground. He said, “My lord, if I find favor with you, do not pass by your servant.

While Christians evolved a reading of this story that has the Lord having supper with Abraham and Sarah, the Jewish reading sees a break: The Lord appeared… and while Abraham was in communion with God, these three guys showed up (angels, according to later Jewish understanding).

The point of the Hebrew text is Abraham’s hospitality to these strangers was such that even being wrapped up in communion with God would not prevent him from serving lunch to strangers on the street.

In this, the Jewish understanding is rather like the Desert Fathers who said even if one is at prayer, one should go to the door if a brother calls. They said this citing John - how can you love God whom you do not see, if you fail to love your brother whom you do not see?

But they could have cited Moses.

Donald on the Theodicy Meme

Would the book of Job make sense as the story and questions of a peasant or serf or share-cropper Job? My question comes from visits to churches and development projects in Cuba, El Salvador, Malawi, Ethiopia, and among native peoples in Canada. These visits leave me wondering whether theodicy – the theological and philosophical work of justifying the goodness of God from (or against) our experience of what happens in the world – is the dilemma of privilege, whether comfort and abundance provoke the question. I readily admit I am reflecting from relatively brief visits. Total time spent is more than two months but under three months. Beyond the visits, this question is shaped by my wife’s continuing work in Malawi – so close working relationship and friendships with Malawian church and community leaders and a month-long visit yearly for the past six years. The question has also been reinforced by conversations with friends who have worked in Peace Corps and done extended church work in poverty settings outside the U.S.

I have returned from my visits with these sisters and brothers humbled and inspired by the unexpected but seemingly steady renewal of joy that people can find despite living in extremely simple circumstances and facing loss and tragedy and simple want. So my question is whether the dilemma of theodicy is a luxury or at least a question conditioned by circumstances, something that only becomes askable after an extended experience of plenty? Did the writer of Job need to set Job up as a very rich man who lost everything for the book to be plausible? Is that what it takes to get us to the wrenching (so yes, very real) questions of theodicy?

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Huw on the Theodicy Meme

if the nature of god is omnipotent, benevolent, and anthropomorphic (that god is a person, who sees suffering as wrong, and can change all of it), why does god not act to relieve all suffering, or at least the greatest amount of suffering for the greatest amount of people the greatest amount of time?

Why does seeing God as “person” mean we are seeing God in an anthropomorphic way? Why do we assume that relieving “at least the greatest amount of suffering for the greatest amount of people the greatest amount of time” would be benevolent?

The basic assumption of Christianity is that while God, in his essence, is unknowable (as are all persons), he decided to reveal himself to us in Jesus and thus it is possible to know God as well as it is possible to know any person. This revelation is that God is love.

Having said that, why assume this partially anthropomorphic deity is, in fact, omnipotent?

We have no reason to assume that based on Scripture: for other than creation itself and the recordings of the apocalypse, God does nothing without human co-operation. It might even be better to say God does nothing save through human co-operation. Even the greatest acts of liberation - the Exodus, the return from the Babylonian Captivity, the Hanukkah Revolution, and the action of Jesus’ death and resurrection - require human participation, human action, human co-operation with God. God does nearly nothing by himself in even the most anthropomorphic stories of the Bible.

Yet God does nearly everything out of love, at least in human hindsight.

Love is not strong in the common sense of the wold. In fact, love is pretty weak. (How many soldiers have been protected from harm by their mothers’ love?) Yet love is stronger than death. Many waters can not quench love.

God is love.

2. if you were god, and you were omnipotent and benevolent, how would you respond to suffering?

Me, now, insists that I would fix it. But then, I’m not benevolent. If I were - and let’s add omniscient to the mix - I don’t know what I’d do. We act as if we know what “benevolent” is. We act as if we know what “good” is and would, in fact, want to do it.

3. if this is not the nature of god, what is the nature of god, that allows suffering in the world?

What I do know is that God weeps. That God-is-Love is a powerful statement not of “let God fix everything” but rather that God weeps watching the world get messed up. God weeps at the best of his best friend, Lazarus. God is afraid of death. God knows that humans are clueless a lot and weeps for that. God knows what it means to go hungry, to skin his knees, to teethe. To have his teeth fall out and be replaced. And God knows how to Cry.

I can’t think of anything more powerful than this image: a God weeping in love at our broken lives.

4. if these are the wrong questions to ask, what are the right ones?

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Fr Ernesto on the Theodicy Meme

1. It is my assumption that God wishes to maximize the number of people saved but not at the cost of creating robots. That is, it seems to me that there are at least two imperatives at work. God wishes all to be saved. God wishes all to have free will. I suspect that there are a few more imperatives than that. For instance, it may very well also be a value for God that those people of free will who are saved also have a desire for holiness and service.

2. There is the additional problem that we would see those as competing values, which would tug at us were we to be in God’s position. However, that is indeed an anthropomorphic way of phrasing it. For, we also believe that God is the only truly integrated personality. That would be my personal updating of the medieval statement that God is “simple.” Thus, for Him, these values would not be competing values that pull and tug at him as they would at us.

3. On top of that because He is a fully integrated personality, each of those things that we would see as separate values, which added together form the “set” of our values, when applied to Him somehow express his nature in full. That is, when we speak of God and say, “God is Love,” or say, “God is Justice,” we do not mean that He is somehow partially love and partially justice. It is obvious that when we speak and say that “God is Love,” we mean that God is totally and fully Love in a way in which we cannot understand, for it is a fully integral and integrated part of his nature. The same is true when we say, “God is Justice.” And yet, these are in Him without contradiction. This is where those who enjoy saying that “God is Love,” therefore He would not do some action, are mistaken. They have picked out what is, for us, one value and separated it out from His nature while excluding that which is equally part of His nature, which is His justice, and His [fill in the blank]. He is Love / Justice / Wrath / Healing / Judge / Lord / King / Master / Shepherd / Friend as one unseparated integrated nature. This is where we hit our limits as human beings because we cannot really conceive of that in our minds.

4. At least one philosopher, Alvin Plantiga, has made an argument with which I think I agree. “This is not the best of all possible worlds, but this is the best of all possible ways to get to the best of all possible worlds.” Apparently the suffering in this world is of the type and intensity that maximizes the number of people to be saved who also will fit whatever other parameters God has. In other words, despite its apparent evil, the total level of human suffering at this time (and in the past, and in hell in the future) will be more than matched by the resulting joy of the numberless crowd from every people, tongue, tribe, and nation which will be with Him in the future. Unfortunately, this is a faith statement on my part. It is the type of statement that can neither be proved nor disproved at this point in time, though if it is correct, it will be demonstrable in the future. However, while not immediately demonstrable, it is nevertheless a philosophically sound position. I think it is also Biblically sound. But note that, like all philosophical positions, it is a human construct and derivation from Scripture, so it has some strong limits.

Fr Erenesto Obregon is an Orthodox priest in Florida.

What did they do?

Where is the right-wing conservative preacher who will tell us now…

What sins did the people of Iowa commit that God punished them with flood waters like he did the people of Indonesia and China?

What sins did the Boy Scouts commit that God should have trapped them in a box canyon and killed them? Michael CHertoff blames God: “It seems like the Boy Scouts didn’t have a chance. It’s truly a tragic act of God.”

This reminds me of 15 years ago when the Midwest flooded (I remember scenes of St Louis pretty much filled with water). No one said God must be punishing them. Nor did God punish the people of Oklahoma City. But for the last 800 years we’ve said God punished the people of Constantinople.

Who gets to decide that, clearly, one act is a punishment while another is, clearly, Satan?

Or maybe we need to stop imagining God functions like that? Or if he does, maybe we need to give up on the idea that we understand it?

Know God…

Three lines leap out at me as I read the Revised Common Lectionary texts for tomorrow:

From Hosea: For I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.

From Paul to the Romans: [Jesus]… who was handed over to death for our trespasses and was raised for our justification.

And Jesus: Go and learn what this means, `I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’

The Collect for the Sunday closest to June 8th asks that “we may think those things that are right, and by [God's] merciful guiding may do them.”

What is the real meaning of “I desire mercy, not sacrifice” or, as the Hosea tranlsation has it, “steadfast love, not sacrifice.”

Well, first off: since the line from Hosea is a poetic parallel, we may understand that “burnt offering” explains or expands on “sacrifice” and “knowledge of God” explains or expands on “mercy/steadfast love”.

In Hebrew, the word “mercy” or “steadfast love” is chesed. In Jewish understanding, this is an action, not a feeling. “Steadfast love” doesn’t come anywhere close to this. One does mercy. How?

Look at the parallel - which Jesus is implicitly citing because he says “go and learn” what all this means.

The parallel with chesed is knowledge of God - in Hebrew, Da’at. This is not simply “head knowledge. This is not something you get by reading books. Da’at is the word used to say “Adam knew Eve”. This is that level of intimacy with God best paralleled with human sexual intimacy.

Got that? The parallel holds.

The meaning of “mercy” is found in “making love with God”.

Jesus “who was handed over to death for our trespasses and was raised for our justification.”

Hear that verse and avoid using “blood sacrifice” there. The Wages of Sin is Death, says Paul elsewhere. But simply paying off a debt doesn’t fix the debtor. The problem that caused the debt to happen is still there.

We are not justified (according to this verse) by Jesus death and blood… that’s something that all humans pay “for our trespasses”. In raising Jesus to life again - one human among many - God has said something new. The blood sacrifice is not new: we all deal with it. But here’s something new: resurrection. Even the NRSV says “for our trespasses” but the Greek preposition, dia, means “through” or even “by means of”. We are all guilty of sending Jesus to death.

But God desires Mercy (love making with God) NOT sacrifice.

Jesus’ death is not a blood debt paid by God to himself (how barbarian!) - it’s what happens to all of us and it’s what we usually do when God sends us love: we kill the guy. But Jesus’ resurrection is something new - intimacy with God.

The parallel holds.

Corpus Christi Desktop

Corpus Christi 2008-4.jpg

Originally uploaded by w.wabbit.



The Sunday within the Octave of Corpus Christie was observed at St Andrew’s Parish with adoration, a procession and mass in the garden behind the Church. (In Buffalo, the minute it gets warm, nearly everyone and everything moves outside.) We will probably be in the garden for much of the next few weeks. There is a complete set of pictures posted on Flickr. I will be adding these to the parish website.

Normally we are a chatty bunch: any time before service all spaces are filled (as at St Gregory’s church) with people chatting and reconnecting after the week. The garden this AM was no exception. Eventually the conversation drifted to Hillary’s recent Kennedy gaff. And the tone became decidedly edgy.

Into the midst of us walked Father Steve who went up to the altar and busied himself. Suddenly, he turned around and, rather loudly, announced, “My Brothers and Sisters in Christ, the blessed sacrament is now exposed on the altar for our meditation and adoration.” He bowed and stepped aside and, lo, there was the monstrance, as you see here.

Total silence descended on the garden and the gathered faithful and it stayed so for the next 20 minutes or so.

I was reminded of one of the saints who said that the difference between us and God is so vast that, when standing in the presence of God, to point out the difference between one human and another would simply be rude.

And so there is the solution, I think, to Lambeth, General Convention and the Schism. Perhaps, even, of Vestry or Parish Council meetings.

Preaching from the OCH

Brother James Michael Dowd, n/OHC, takes a little turn to the East in his Trinity sermon:

…I think a fact-based approach to faith is missing the point by a mile. We need a Truth-based approach to faith. And for that, we need mystery, we need wonder, we need imagination. This is not to denigrate science, or mathematics or even theological studies. Not at all. Each of those disciplines has taught us about some aspect of God’s awesome and wondrous creation, and therefore has taught us something about God, about the Trinity. But it seems to me that to be on this journey with God is to begin to get to know God. And to begin to get to know God, is to begin to fall in love with God. And when it comes to loving God, a little mystery can go a long way.