Matthew 18 and Spiritual Abuse

I have been asked a few times over the last several months to do a blog post on Matthew 18:15-17, where Jesus teaches about what to do if a member of a Christian group is committing wrongs that are harmful enough that they cannot be overlooked.  Here's the text, from the 2011 NIV:

“If your brother or sister sins, go and point out their fault, just between the two of you. If they listen to you, you have won them over. But if they will not listen, take one or two others along, so that ‘every matter may be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses.’ If they still refuse to listen, tell it to the church; and if they refuse to listen even to the church, treat them as you would a pagan or a tax collector.

The context of this verse is as part of one of Jesus' large teaching units in the gospel of Matthew.  He is here teaching about interpersonal relationships within the  "kingdom of heaven" [verse 1], which will include all who trust and follow Jesus.  He starts by stating that the greatest in the kingdom is as a little child, which, as I described in another blog post, meant letting go of earthly status and hierarchy. Then He goes on to warn against "despising" any of these "little ones-- those who believe in Me."  In other words, those who believe in Jesus should voluntarily become lowly and without status, like children ("little ones"), and their resulting vulnerability must not be taken advantage of or used to harm them. (For an excellent study of the whole chapter, see the Christian Resource Institute's study by Roger Hahn.)  He then talks about how valuable these "little ones" are to the Father, and how He will seek them if they stray.

It is at this point that verses 15-17 occur: just after the discussion of stumbling blocks put in the way of the "little ones."  The Christian group as a whole can choose to remove anyone who is causing grievous harm to one or more members of the group.  Jesus speaks in terms of "brothers and sisters" to indicate equality of status in the group.  He does not envisage the church as a hierarchy where leaders alone assume the power to excommunicate; an action as drastic as that should be done by the consensus of the whole group.

The rest of the teaching is about interpersonal forgiveness when brothers and sisters sin against one another.  Jesus speaks of the need to forgive "up to seventy times seven" times, and tells a parable whose point is that, since God has forgiven us so much, we ought also to forgive one another.  Taking this section together with verses 15-17 leads me to conclude that Jesus is differentiating between forgiveness (personal letting go of animosity) and reconciliation (restoring relationships).   To forgive someone up to seventy-times-seven times is one thing; to have them "listen to you" so that you have "won them over" is another.   The possibility of excommunication means that relationship is not to be restored when the person who has harmed you is unrepentant and unwilling to change-- even after being confronted with witnesses to the harm that was done.

The principles of Jesus' teaching in Matthew 18:15-17 are sound.  A group should have the power to disassociate itself from people who are causing serious harm to one or more members, and a graduated-step process seems the most appropriate way to deal with such people.  The problem is that these verses are so often misused, particularly by people in power to enable themselves to stay in power.  Here are some examples from around the blogosphere:

From Under Much Grace:

In many spiritually abusive groups, Matthew chapter 18, verses 15-19 is used like a static formula which is misapplied to manipulate and control others. Many misapply it as something appropriate for minor offenses instead of overt sin, as the consequences of the process can result in excommunication from that local church. A person can be offended by someone's behavior, but it may not necessarily constitute a sin, particularly not one that carries such heavy consequences. In aberrant Christian groups, the passage is used to rid the group of “problem,” nonconformist members (who are not sinning) and becomes a means by which clergy can micromanage if not threaten church members. (It is used to manipulate and control behavior.)

Among very litigious groups, the process is used to declare people non-Christian or never legitimate Christians so that they can be at liberty to violate a directive of the Apostle Paul who forbids Christians to sue other Christians, as it is found in a letter he wrote to the Church at Corinth (1 Corinthians 6:1-11). This practice of threatening to “de-Christianize” other professing Christians is actually common among those who follow patriarchy. This type of abuse of the passage has become popular enough that the saying that a person has been “Matthew Eighteened” has become somewhat commonplace among some Protestant Evangelical groups.

From Debra Bouey at Crossword Articles:

When Biblical apologists comment publicly on . . . aberrant, sometimes heretical, teachings, the principals involved, and their supporters, quickly and repeatedly raise the "Matthew 18 Argument", contending that the "brother" [or, as the case may be, "sister"] should have been approached privately, "according to Matthew 18".

From ResolveChurchConflict.com:

Jesus's words here were not intended and should not be used as a general model for all conflict resolution. . . Matthew 18 instructs the church on how to deal with sin on an interpersonal level that is serious enough to remove an unrepentant member from fellowship. . .  Matthew 18 is not applicable for solving differences of opinion and other kinds of problems. 

From Slacktivist:

99 percent of the time, this is the way this passage is used and abused — as a cudgel to beat truth-tellers back into silence. How dare you expose my wrong-doing? Jesus commanded you to come to me privately, so that we could work this out just between the two of us. . .

From the Biblical Seminary Theology Blog:

Does this passage require that abuse victims forego reporting abuse to the authorities and to make a private confrontation of the perpetrator? Sadly, I have heard stories where not only were victims chastised for reporting abuse, but then made to go to the perpetrator and confess their sin of not following Matthew 18.

From Rachel Held Evans' Interview with Boz Tchividjian:

[T]his passage is used as a justification for 1) not reporting abuse disclosures to the civil authorities and 2) convincing sexual abuse victims to privately confront their perpetrators. Needless to say, this misinterpretation of Matthew 18 is hugely destructive on a number of fronts.

It's very important not to lift verses like Matthew 18:15-17 out of their historical context-- how they were meant to be understood and applied in their original setting, to their original audience. Jesus' words were meant to be understood in terms of a small counter-cultural group within an indifferent or even hostile surrounding culture.  Such a group had a much greater need to police its own members for things which today are crimes which should be handled by civil authorities.  Jesus also was not envisioning a church where power was concentrated in the hands of one or two people who would then be in a position to abuse their authority.  Neither was He setting forth some universal principle for conflict resolution to be applied in a blanket manner to all situations.  As Boz Tchividjian says later in the above-linked interview:

Matthew 18 is important for local church life, because Jesus commands us there how to deal with sin. But it is not the only passage in which Jesus tells us how to deal with sin. It must be properly synthesized with others that address the same subject directly and/or indirectly. It is critical to remember that all passages are regulated and interpreted by the balance of Scripture. . . [For instance,] on Romans 13, Jesus tells us through the Apostle Paul that believers are to be subject to the civil authorities.

I don't think that even in the early days when the civil authorities were mostly hostile, would the church have required a sexual abuse victim to privately confront a perpetrator.  1 Corinthians 5:1 seems to indicate a situation like this, where the man who "had his father's wife" appeared to be held solely responsible and the congregation was instructed to remove him from the fellowship.  Women had far less agency then than they have today in any event-- but there appears to have been no idea in Paul's mind that the woman should follow a Matthew 18 private confrontation.

In the authoritarian, spiritually abusive group I was part of in my earlier Christian life, the problem was not so much crimes that should have been handled by civil authorities, but the fact that confronting a leader with his sin would lead directly to leader-led discipline against the person who dared to complain.  Trying to discuss a wrong privately with an authoritarian leader is impossible-- it will immediately be turned around to be construed as your sin, not his.  As the above Slacktivist quote states, Matthew 18 thus becomes a way to keep the rank-and-file members from speaking out.

And of course, authoritarian leaders often also use Matthew 18 as if simply disagreeing with them-- about anything at all-- were sin.  And then once a person has been excommunicated using the Matthew 18 process, they can be treated as enemies and prosecuted or sued accordingly (as the above Under Much Grace article notes).

Finally, a person who speaks out publicly against spiritually abusive doctrines can be accused of not handling it biblically, by taking the disagreement to the person privately first. This has a way of simply shutting down all discussion.  But Jesus and the apostles themselves were actually quite vocal about publicly refuting doctrines and teachings they disagreed with.  Matthew 18 is not about doctrinal differences.

Other passages show situations which were not "Matthew 18" events.  In Acts 15:39 Paul and Barnabas had a "sharp disagreement" without handling it according to Jesus' Matthew 18 teaching, because His teaching simply did not apply to disagreements about who to travel with!  And when Paul found Peter, a fellow church leader, involved in public hypocrisy, Paul also rebuked him publicly (Galatians 2:11-14).  Paul doesn't seem to have expected any of the Gentiles who were being ostracized at the table, to confront Peter privately.  Jesus' Matthew 18 teachings apparently didn't apply there, either-- possibly because Peter's sin was not harmful enough that he needed to be asked to leave.  Or possibly because Peter's actions were in front of everybody, and so his correction needed to also be in front of everybody.  Or perhaps because Peter was an apostle, and Paul thought it best for another apostle to confront him.  Or all three.

It's never a good idea to isolate one set of verses from the rest of scripture and follow them slavishly as if they were universally applicable in every situation.  Particularly in ways that violate the good which the passage intended, and do harm the passage never contemplated.

In any event, Christians, and especially Christian leaders, need to be careful about using passages of scripture to their own advantage at the expense of others.  This is against every principle that Jesus taught-- and it's what most of His rebukes of the scribes and Pharisees were about.

A Bible used as a weapon against other human beings, is always a Bible misused.

Seeking the God Beyond God

Blogger PerfectNumber recently wrote a post called Could He Really Accept Me As I Am? I Mean, REALLY ACCEPT.  Using a hypothetical "other" voice, she speaks as if she were calling herself back to a kind of understanding of Jesus, God and Christianity that she can no longer accept: 

Perfect Number, he accepts you as you are, and he will guide you and give you time and help you to change into a "good Christian." 

He'll take you back to the way you were before, forgiving all this straying, all this questioning and the blasphemous things I've said on my blog. 

Yes, he accepts you as you are, even though you don't believe in purity, and you don't oppose gay rights, and you *gasp* have even been deceived into thinking abortion might sometimes be okay. 

It's okay, Perfect Number. Come back to Jesus. 

And I fear that's the deal. And that's why I don't want to come back to [that version of] Jesus.  I won't give him everything. I don't surrender. Obedience to God is not the highest thing in my life. 

You guys, I want love to be the highest thing.

And life. And freedom. 

And no matter what Jesus says, I won't go along with anything that is, as far as I can tell, incompatible with love and life and freedom. [Emphases in original.]

And then there's the story Vyckie Garrison of No Longer Quivering once told.  This was on an old message board that is now defunct, so I can't share the link, but in the "Quiverfull" movement, women are often burdened with the requirement to eschew all birth control regardless of whether their own health, or even their lives, are in danger.  Vyckie tells the story of a husband who loved his wife enough to refuse to go along with this:

"I had a friend who was bedridden with every pregnancy and each time it was worse ~ not life-threatening, but just really miserable. After the 6th, her husband asserted his "authority" over her ~ and had a vasectomy. He refused to put his wife through that any more.

I remember feeling so jealous ~ I couldn't imagine having a such a decisive husband who was willing to take the responsibility to say, "No more" himself ~ and I was really impressed when he told me, "It may not be the right thing scripturally ~ but if God has a problem with it, He can take it up with me. I will not do that to my wife again." Wow ~ a god-fearing man willing to take on the Lord in defense of his wife. That's love like I have rarely seen."

While I disagree in general with husbands "asserting authority" over their wives, in this case I can't help but see the husband as doing the most loving thing he could in a no-win situation. But I have to ask: what kind of a god is this, that an ordinary human man can so easily outdo him in love and compassion? A deity who would insist on "the right thing scripturally" to the real harm of its followers-- who cares more about rigid rules than about people?

Jesus said in Luke 10:27 that the whole law is encapsulated in this: "Love the Lord your God with all your heart. . . and your neighbor as yourself."  And then when asked "who is my neighbor?" He told the story of the Good Samaritan, the hated outcast who treated a member of the story-hearers' own people with care and compassion.  So the question is, if our enemy is our neighbor, how can our spouse not be our neighbor?  Surely despite whatever this Quiverfull couple's church said, the husband could not have been disobeying God if he loved his wife as himself?

And if "God is love" (1 John 4:8) and if "the truth shall set you free" (John 8:32), then how could Perfect Number be going against Jesus if she's prioritizing love and life and freedom?*  And why should obedience to God be the highest thing in her life if it's not obedience to love?  If we're not obeying love, are we obeying God at all?

The way I see it, if we find we want to be, and can be, morally better than our conception of God, then what we're following isn't God. According to St. Anselm, God is "That than which nothing higher can be conceived." If we can easily conceive of a better, a morally higher God, then our god is too small-- it's only a caricature of God. The better, higher version is closer to the God we're really searching for, the One we should be seeking.

James McGrath at Exploring Our Matrix defines the common phrase "God Beyond God":

This is the very ancient idea that, beyond any sort of anthropomorphic deity that we may think of and tell stories about, there must be an even greater reality that transcends our ability to comprehend and describe.

The Christian idea of God has always been an idea of transcendence, of an Entity beyond human conception, but which makes Itself known to humanity using ideas we can understand.
There are a number of places in the Bible where, despite the fact that the writers' human understanding of God was limited (as ours is too), the idea of a "God beyond God" shines through.

• God said to Moses, "I AM WHO I AM"; and He said, "Thus you shall say to the sons of Israel, 'I AM has sent me to you.'" Exodus 3:14. 

• For My thoughts are not your thoughts, Nor are your ways My ways," declares the LORD. "For as the heavens are higher than the earth, So are My ways higher than your ways And My thoughts than your thoughts. Isaiah 55:8-9. 

• He who is the blessed and only Sovereign, the King of kings and Lord of lords,who alone possesses immortality and dwells in unapproachable light, whom no man has seen or can see. . . . 1 Timothy 6:15-16. 

• The God who made the world and all things in it, since He is Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in temples made with hands; nor is He served by human hands, as though He needed anything, since He Himself gives to all people life and breath and all things. . . . Acts 17:24-25.

If we mistake God's accommodation of God's Self to our limited understanding, for the real God, then we are re-making God in our own image and ascribing to God our own limitations.  We make God into what Joe Hinman on his blog The Religious A Priori calls "just a big guy in the sky."

The result is that we can then end up with a god which is little more than a big stick used to enforce religious control.  Rules get prioritized over people, and obedience to those rules gets mistaken for devotion.  And then when someone protests and tries to seek a more transcendent idea of God, their very seeking is construed as rebellion and disobedience!

To this, some might respond that what looks like love to us sinful humans isn't really love, or that God is holy just as much as God is love, so have to mix our love with hatred of sin.  To this I would reply that love is holy-- because sin is that which hurts ourselves or others, and love will always oppose people hurting themselves or other people.  And anyway, 1 Corinthians 13:4-8 shows what love is:

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.

To bring the familiar words into clearer focus, let's paraphrase the verses using opposites:

Love is never impatient; love is never cruel.  Love is pleased when others do well, love draws attention to the accomplishments of others, love is humble.  Love honors others and seeks their good.  Love stays calm and supportive; love is only angered by the giving of real harm.  Love keeps memories of the joys and triumphs of others.  Love never abandons, never becomes judgmental, never sees the worst in people, and doesn't view loved ones with disappointment or cynicism.  Love never gives up on you.  Love goes on and on. 

Anything counter to this kind of love is not holiness.  And any version of God that is impatient, cruel or any of these other things isn't holy either.

So I say if we're going to seek God, let's keep seeking the God beyond God.  No matter what anyone else says.


--------------------
*Note:  I know that taking snippets of verses like this can look like proof-texting, which means lifting pieces of scripture out of context to make it say whatever you want.  But I believe that the snippets I'm quoting do bring across the meaning I am intending to convey here, when they are taken in context. 

"Falling into the Holes in Their Own Thought"

(Cross-posted from Bible Literature Translation)

I have been following a blogsphere conversation that Bible Literature Translation (among others) has been involved in, particularly in its Noting Abusive Theologians post, where blog contributor GaudeteTheology noted:

In my class on the History of Systematic Theology, my classmates and I were shocked to learn from our professor (not from any of our books) that Paul Tillich had extramarital affairs, including sexual contacts with his students which certainly today would be considered sexual harassment at best, abusive at worst. It generated an important discussion about the extent to which we could rely on the intellectual work of a theologian whose life showed such serious failings in his ability to “walk the talk,” on the one hand; and the extent to which all of us are sinners, and thus all theologians are sinners, so why do we expect anything different, on the other. . . 

(I do not recall whether the discussion broke out along gender lines; I do recall that another woman student and I were among the most vocally horrified, and that our professor, a man, was rather strongly making the case that we shouldn’t be surprised or concerned.)

[M]y immediate response to learning of this theologian’s persistent sinful patterns of behavior was to question whether and how it reflected on the value of his theology. It seems a screamingly obvious question to me.

This last week Fred Clark at Slacktivist contributed more to this discussion.  Clark's post is in response to Roger Olson's recent question, "Should a theologian's life affect how we regard his/her theology?" Leaving aside for now the issue of whether all sins should be viewed in the same light (whether we should, as Clark thinks Olson does, put excessive beer-drinking in the same category as advocating the slaughter of peasants), I found Clark's post very helpful in providing an alternative to either dismissing a person's theology because of his personal life, or dismissing a person's personal life because of her theology.

Clark says:

It is, rather, a vitally important matter of identifying the way these men fell into the holes in their own thought so that we can avoid falling into those holes ourselves. We can’t shrug off Yoder’s sexual abuse or Jefferson’s slave-owning as, in Olson’s compartmentalizing phrase, “sides to their personal lives that we cannot be proud of". . . 

Did Luther’s anti-Semitism “affect” his theology, or did his theology foster his anti-Semitism? Yes, both. Did George Whitefield’s slave-owning shape his otherworldly revivalism or did his otherworldly revivalism rationalize his slave-owning? Yes, both. 

The inability to recognize that cause and effect can flow both ways makes it unlikely that Olson will be able to “use it but highlight those areas” where the taint of this “scandalous action” can be identified as a discrete, separate compartment of thought. That’s not how humans work.

I think it is important to avoid the ad hominem fallacy when considering this question. After all, the truth or falsehood of a statement is not changed by the nature of the person who makes it. But (and this is an important "but") individual statements of truth or falsehood don't exist in a vacuum. They are each one bit of a whole system of thought subscribed to by the person making them. And often, human beings being what they are, inconsistencies and even outright contradictions can exist within a person's system of thought. These inconsistencies and contradictions often come from unexamined assumptions and prejudices within the person who is writing or speaking. The cognitive dissonance thus created is often assuaged by some small cheat, such as an unacknowledged change in the definitions of the words being used. For instance, Thomas Jefferson's idea that all people are equal is one tenet of his thought. The idea that certain kinds of humans aren't really people is another tenet of the same man's thought: the one that justified both slaveholding and the ongoing rape of certain of his female slaves. Both ideas have to be taken into account in order to make proper sense of Jefferson. The fact that equality depends on how "people" are defined is a weakness in his system of thought that needs to be recognized. In fact, it's a weakness that he either introduced or allowed, in order to justify his personal behavior to himself.

We can't ignore Jefferson's weakness relating to who gets defined as fully human, if we want to avoid falling into similar traps in our own thinking.

Roger Olson's reasoning on the subject is as follows:

If we were to discount the value of every theologian whose life was in some way scandalous our library shelves would be much less burdened down. And perhaps our theological thinking poorer. And I didn’t even mention all the German theologians and biblical scholars who supported National Socialism! 

Having said all that, I have to add this. If those German theologians allowed their pro-Nazi sympathies to infect their writings we would all, I suspect, decline to use them in our courses. So, to the extent that a theologian allowed his infidelities, racial prejudices, wrong political views, to affect his scholarship, I believe we must inevitably either 1) discard his scholarship, or 2) use it but highlight those areas where the scandalous parts of his life affected it. 

However, to the extent that the theologian’s scandalous actions did not affect his theology (or biblical scholarship) I see no reason to make much of them. They should probably be mentioned in a biography but there’s no need to reject his whole theology because of them.

Olson's writing here, I think, reveals his tendency to think in just the sort of binaries I have asserted we should try to avoid-- that either a theologian's theology has been affected by his personal life, or it hasn't; and that it's possible for it not to have been. And where it has been so affected, if it's not too pervasive it's possible to cut away those places like a bit of mold on a piece of cheese, leaving the rest good and usable. However, if the taint of the theologian's personal life is too pervasive, the entire theology must be discarded.

But I'm afraid we humans really don't work that way. We are all a mixture of bad and good acting and thinking. Our thinking does affect the way we act, and the way we act does affect our thinking-- and this is particularly true of the kind of people whose words, spoken or written, are wise enough to have been remembered down through the years. Wise people don't usually leave their actions unjustified by their thinking, because they are thinkers and they can't function that way.

Therefore, it's important to take a theologian's private life into account when reading his or her writings, and note where cognitive dissonance may have been compensated for by changes in definitions and other such things. 

If Tillich abused young women at Union Theological Seminary, then his attitude towards women certainly affected what he wrote (or didn't write) about Eve. The key is to keep that in mind when reading his Systematic Theology and other works.

N. T. Wright's Complementarianism

[Cross-posted from Bible Literature Translation]

There has been a lot of talk in the blogosphere about the Interview with N. T. Wright on First Things on the subject of sexuality.  N. T. (Tom) Wright is, as this website puts it, "Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at the University of St Andrews, Scotland, and was formerly Bishop of Durham in England." I have read several of his books and lectures and have found him to be in general an articulate scholar and a convincing writer on Christianity and the Bible.

The interview linked above is a portion of a longer interview, and it focuses on Wright's (negative) views on gay marriage.  The puzzling thing about the interview is how it departs from Wright's usual reasoned discourse to compare those who believe marriage can and should be extended to same-sex couples, to Nazis and Stalinists.  This is not the kind of approach I'm used to reading from a man I highly respect.  Several other blogs, such as Sarah Over the Moon and Slacktivist, have taken issue with this approach.* Several posts at Bible Literature Translation, such as this one by Suzanne McCarthy and this one by J. K. Gayle, have focused on some of the implications of Wright's thinking, focusing in particular on this quote from the interview:

With Christian or Jewish presuppositions, or indeed Muslim, then if you believe in what it says in Genesis 1 about God making heaven and earth—and the binaries in Genesis are so important—that heaven and earth, and sea and dry land, and so on and so on, and you end up with male and female. It’s all about God making complementary pairs which are meant to work together. The last scene in the Bible is the new heaven and the new earth, and the symbol for that is the marriage of Christ and his church. It’s not just one or two verses here and there which say this or that. It’s an entire narrative which works with this complementarity so that a male-plus-female marriage is a signpost or a signal about the goodness of the original creation and God’s intention for the eventual new heavens and new earth.

This paragraph from Wright's book Surprised by Hope is also appropos:

Heaven and earth, it seems, are not after all poles apart, needing to be separated for ever when all the children of heaven have been rescued from this wicked earth. Nor are they simply different ways of looking at the same thing, as would be implied by some kinds of pantheism. No: they are different, radically different; but they are made for each other in the same way (Revelation is suggesting) as male and female. And, when they finally come together, that will be cause for rejoicing in the same way that a wedding is: a creational sign that God’s project is going forwards; that opposite poles within creation are made for union, not competition; that love and not hate have the last word in the universe; that fruitfulness and not sterility is God’s will for creation.

Wright's views against same-sex marriage, then, are rooted in his insistence that the very meaning of marriage is about male and female-- and that men and women, males and females, themselves are representative of something larger, some overarching pattern of complementary binaries in God's plan for creation and re-creation, and there can be no deviations from that pattern:

If you say that marriage now means something which would allow other such configurations, what you’re saying is actually that when we marry a man and a woman we’re not actually doing any of that stuff. This is just a convenient social arrangement and sexual arrangement and there it is . . . get on with it. . . If that’s what you thought marriage meant, then clearly we haven’t done a very good job in society as a whole and in the church in particular in teaching about just what a wonderful mystery marriage is supposed to be.** Simply at that level, I think it’s a nonsense. It’s like a government voting that black should be white.

It's not my purpose here to give a complete Scriptural and philosophical defense of gay marriage. Though I am no longer at all convinced that the passages of Scripture that are used to deny gay marriage address committed, faithful same-sex unions at all, I think I've got a lot more still to study and learn about that topic.*** But I do want to talk about the subject of binary thinking and exclusionary definitions such as Wright displays in the quotes above, and how they relate to the concept of "complementarity" in male-female relations, particularly in marriage.

Before he started blogging at Bible Literature Translation, J. K. Gayle blogged at Aristotle's Feminist Subject, where he said this in 2009::

We are suspicious of binaries. And we are suspicious not because binaries cannot or do not exist in nature. But we are suspicious of binaries because the binary is the fundamental structure of patriarchy. The would-be pure and precise division of the binary helps and has helped and will continue to help males to be dominant over females. In contrast, there's feminine discourse, which tends not to be reduced to the "either / or" but, rather, tends to be "both and" and "more."

And in 2011 he said:

[A]lthough we in the west tend to speak in terms of categories, that are binary, as if they are natural, our practices are ancient, going back to the man Aristotle, who profoundly believed that females naturally were inferior to males.

The idea of binaries as exclusionary, either A or Not A, shows more the influence of Aristotelian categories on Western thought than it reflects the mindsets of either the ancient Hebrew or New Testament Greek writers. This Aristotelian way of thinking is certainly not the only way to approach the texts. Even if not consciously intended by Wright, the Bible's concept of binaries brought into union definitely implies a "both-and" kind of relationship in many instances, rather than the exlusionary either-or. As Rabbi Rachel Barenblat says on her blog Velveteen Rabbi:

This is what it means to say that the Jews accepted the Torah for real at Purim: we accepted the deepest Torah, the highest Torah, the Torah in which there is no longer a distinction between the "good guys" and the "bad guys" because to God on high it's all one. At this level of spiritual elevation, there's nothing which the sitra achra, the "other side" -- in a word, evil -- can grasp. Once you get to this high place, evil has fallen away. This is the point at which we're connecting not with the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil (which presumes binaries) but rather the Tree of Life.

The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil was what kept Adam and Eve away from the Tree of Life.  God did order the world in Genesis 1 through binaries, but that doesn't mean there's only "either/or" and never "both/and" or "more."  The presence of a pattern does not exclude combinations or exceptions.  Also, the binaries of Scripture are generally principles or patterns, not laws or rules. There are very real, very human humans who have an extra X chromosome, or who present as one sex but have the hormones of the other. And God created them.

I must disagree with Wright that presence of an exception or combination somehow denigrates or damages the pattern or principle. Just as the existence of the platypus is not bad just because it doesn't fit the pattern of either a land creature or a water creature, the existence of humans and human relationships that don't fit the male-female pattern do not destroy the pattern. The Genesis binary patterns are beautiful, but they are not set forth as law, and not fitting into them is not disobedience.

God did divide the light from the darkness and call one "day" and the other "night," -- but His presence became manifest, walking in the Garden, in the "cool of the day": i.e., twilight.

It's outside my pay grade to speculate on or judge the motives of another person, so I will simply note that clinging to a patriarchal, exclusionary binary pattern when it comes to marriage seems to cause contradictions within Dr. Wright's own teachings.  Most of us egalitarians love to quote his teaching Women's Service in the Church: The Biblical Basis:

If those in Christ are the true family of Abraham, which is the point of the whole [Galatians 3] story, then the manner of this identity and unity takes a quantum leap beyond the way in which first-century Judaism construed them, bringing male and female together as surely and as equally as Jew and Gentile. What Paul seems to be doing in this passage, then, is ruling out any attempt to back up the continuing male privilege in the structuring and demarcating of Abraham’s family by an appeal to Genesis 1, as though someone were to say, ‘But of course the male line is what matters, and of course male circumcision is what counts, because God made male and female.’ No, says Paul, none of that counts when it comes to membership in the renewed people of Abraham.

 But sometimes we don't notice what Wright is not saying in that essay.  He's not saying he's an egalitarian.  He's only saying he doesn't think women should be restricted in church ministry.  He makes it clear, though, that he is not saying anything about his views on marriage, and that "ticking the box" of women in church ministry does not necessarily meaning "ticking a dozen other boxes down the same side of the page."  In fact, when it comes to marriage, this piece written by Andrew Wilson on the Confluence Blog defines Wright's view as follows:

Wives and husbands, along with everyone in the church, are called to submit to one another out of reverence for Christ, but not in identical ways. The church submits to Christ by recognizing him as head, and following his leadership. Christ submits to the church by loving her, taking on the form of a slave, giving himself up for her, and presenting her holy and blameless. So when Paul compares the wife to the church and the husband to Christ, he is saying that the ways in which their ‘mutual submission’ is expressed will be different: the woman will follow her husband’s lead, and the man will exercise his leadership by serving his wife, as Christ-like leaders always do. (This view is very simply expressed by Tom Wright in Paul For Everyone: The Prison Letters).

Wilson then directly quotes Wright:

Paul assumes, as do most cultures, that there are significant differences between men and women, differences that go far beyond mere biological and reproductive function. Their relations and roles must therefore be mutually complementary, rather than identical. Equality in voting rights, and in employment opportunities and remuneration (which is still not a reality in many places), should not be taken to imply such identity. And, within marriage, the guideline is clear. The husband is to take the lead – though he is to do so fully mindful of the self-sacrificial model which the Messiah has provided. As soon as ‘taking the lead’ becomes bullying or arrogant, the whole thing collapses.

This is a very "soft" complementarianism to be sure, but it is complementarianism all the same.  And Wright does insist in his "Women's Service in the Church" teaching that there must be no blurring of the male-female binary:

But once we have grasped this point we must take a step back and reflect on what Paul has not done as well as what he has done. In regard to the Jew/Gentile distinction, Paul’s fierce and uncompromising insistence on equality in Christ does not at all mean that we need pay no attention to the distinctives between those of different cultural backgrounds when it comes to living together in the church. . . the differences between them are not obliterated, and pastoral practice needs to take note of this; they are merely irrelevant when it comes to belonging to Abraham’s family. And this applies, I suggest, mutatis mutandis, to Paul’s treatment of men and women within the Christian family. The difference is irrelevant for membership status and membership badges. But it is still to be taken note of when it comes to pastoral practice. We do not become hermaphrodites or for that matter genderless, sexless beings when we are baptised.

And yet in the very same essay, Wright says this:

I notice that on one of your leaflets you adopt what is actually a mistranslation of this verse: neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female. That is precisely what Paul does not say; and as it’s what we expect he’s going to say, we should note quite carefully what he has said instead, since he presumably means to make a point by doing so, a point which is missed when the translation is flattened out as in that version. What he says is that there is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, no ‘male and female’. I think the reason he says ‘no male and female’ rather than ‘neither male nor female’ is that he is actually quoting Genesis 1, and that we should understand the phrase ‘male and female’ in scare-quotes.

So does Paul mean that in Christ the created order itself is undone? Is he saying, as some have suggested, that we go back to a kind of chaos in which no orders of creation apply any longer? Or is he saying that we go on, like the gnostics, from the first rather shabby creation in which silly things like gender-differentiation apply to a new world in which we can all live as hermaphrodites – which, again, some have suggested, and which has interesting possible ethical spin-offs? No. Paul is a theologian of new creation, and it is always the renewal and reaffirmation of the existing creation, never its denial, as not only Galatians 6.16 but also of course Romans 8 and 1 Corinthians 15 make so very clear. Indeed, Genesis 1—3 remains enormously important for Paul throughout his writings.

What then is he saying? Remember that he is controverting in particular those who wanted to enforce Jewish regulations, and indeed Jewish ethnicity, upon Gentile converts. Remember the synagogue prayer in which the man who prays thanks God that he has not made him a Gentile, a slave or a woman – at which point the women in the congregation that God ‘that you have made me according to your will’. I think Paul is deliberately marking out the family of Abraham reformed in the Messiah as a people who cannot pray that prayer, since within this family these distinctions are now irrelevant. . . 

Remember that the presenting issue in Galatians is circumcision, male circumcision of course. We sometimes think of circumcision as a painful obstacle for converts, as indeed in some ways it was; but of course for those who embraced it it was a matter of pride and privilege. It not only marked out Jews from Gentiles; it marked them out in a way which automatically privileged males. By contrast, imagine the thrill of equality brought about by baptism, the identical rite for Jew and Gentile, slave and free, male and female.

Wright is saying that men are still men and women are still women in Christianity, and that they should be fully who they are; that women should not try to be just like men in the way they minister. But he is also saying that the whole "there is not male and female" is a reversal of the text of Genesis 1, "male and female He created them."  He uses this as justification for Paul's support of women in all areas of ministry.  The distinctions that would make a man say, "I thank God I was not born a Gentile, a slave or a woman" are all distinctions of privilege, whether of race, economics or gender.  These privileges must now be laid down, for they are irrelevant.  Equality has been brought about by the substitution of baptism for circumcision.

And yet it is that very privilege, that very distinction, which Wright upholds in male headship in marriage.  If the husband, despite being "fully mindful of the self-sacrificial model which the Messiah has provided," still assumes that leadership belongs to him by right, he is acting according to a distinction of privilege which man assumed over woman as a consequence of the Fall in Genesis 3:16. We read in Philippians 2 that privilege (as the equal of God) was the very thing that Christ laid down, in order to take the form of a slave-- which constituted, at the Crucifixion, a complete emptying of privilege.  Galatians 3, as I have insisted elsewhere, cannot mean something different for women than it means for Gentiles and slaves.  If a free Jewish man could not say to a Gentile or slave, "Be happy with the level ground at the foot of the cross, but being free and Jewish means the privilege of leadership belongs to me alone," then a free Jewish man could not say it to a woman either.  Not even if she were his wife.

Like Wright, I see a pattern of binaries in Genesis 1, and I also see a pattern throughout the New Testament of things that have been separated brought back together.  What I don't see is exclusive binaries that deny the right to exist of anything outside them.  Nor do I see God endorsing the upholding of patterns of privilege and marginalization-- which must die if the promised union is ever to be complete.

I know I don't have Wright's credentials or education, but Paul did say God had chosen the foolish and the weak things of the world to confound those who are strong and wise.  Sometimes not having privileges also means we are free from being blinded by them.

I very much appreciate the opportunities I've had to learn good things from Dr. Wright.  There have been logs in my own eye that his teachings have definitely helped me to remove.  So I feel emboldened to point out this speck in his.  May God be gracious to us both.


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*Sarah Over the Moon wrote a very good follow-up piece yesterday.  Suffice it to say that I agree with her whole-heartedly that no matter how much many of us may like and respect N. T. Wright, Christianity has no superstars other than Christ, and no Christian leader should ever be considered exempt from examination and critique of his or her views.

** Here, I think, Wright misquotes the passage, for Paul never says marriage is a mystery. He says the union of Christ and the church is a mystery.  Human marriage is supposed to look towards that union, but it is not that union.

***My basic approach to the gay marriage question is to rely on the litmus test once set forth by Augustine. “Whoever, then, thinks that he understands the Holy Scriptures, or any part of them, but puts such an interpretation upon them as does not tend to build up this twofold love of God and our neighbor, does not yet understand them as he ought." Love of my LGBT neighbors means listening to them and trying my best to understand their perspective.  The question in my mind in regards to any practice must be, "Does it harm the self, the other, or the creation?"  And if not, is it not love of my neighbors to allow them to enjoy the same kind of committed union that gives me such comfort and support? 

Book Recommendation: The Trace of God by Joseph Hinman

I don't remember what year it was or exactly how old I was when it happened.  The kids were young: that much I remember, so I must have been in my mid-40s.  It was summer-- I remember that, too.   

I was standing in our tiny back yard behind the kitchen door, under a sky filled with stars. I think it was about 10 or 11 pm.  I was alone. For some reason more stars were showing than usual; maybe some of the street lights were out.  It was very quiet.
I looked up into the stars and thought of God. 

And then. . .  

Something indescribable fell away from my ordinary sense of things.  Perhaps it was the careful, reasoned categories I was accustomed to use to frame my thoughts.  I had a sensation of being lifted up and up, though I also knew I was still standing solidly in the night-sweet grass.  Over the horizon the moon swept up; it was a gibbous moon, about two-thirds full.  And I saw. 

Saw that all things were part of a serene and purposeful whole.  Saw that I myself was a valued and necessary part of that whole, as were the trees, the grass, the stars, the moon, and the minuscule flying creatures that brushed my face.  Felt a tender, loving purpose guiding it all towards some unknowable but beautiful end.    

"All is well. All is one.  I am here."

It wasn't a message spoken in words, but an indescribable knowing that was frankly impossible to doubt or question.  I didn't question it.  I breathed quickly, flutteringly-- completely astonished yet completely at ease, completely accepted and accepting. 

Slowly, slowly the feeling faded, drained away.  I was left there in the dark grass again, myself again, and I turned and drifted back through the door and into bed and sleep.

But I have never forgotten, and I have never been the same.  The memory of joy-- joy present in part now and expectant of fullness in time to come, has ever since held in peace the foundations of my soul. 

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"There is no proof of your god."

Several years before the experience I have shared above, I had a crisis of faith.  In my early 40s I encountered on the Internet people who knew a lot more about science than I did and who insisted that if something was real, science would support that it was real.  I found I didn't know how to answer them.  "There is no proof," the atheists said, and I knew they were right.  Anything that seemed to me to be a good enough reason to believe, was never going to be enough for scientific rationalism.  So what if they were right, and I was wrong?  Supposing I was only deluding myself about the existence of God?

I remember my frustration, how I cried to the heavens, "God, couldn't you just give one incontrovertible proof? Something so we could be sure?"

But there was no answer.  God, it seemed-- if he existed-- felt no need to answer such a prayer.  Or maybe he couldn't, because he wasn't really there. . .

For months I struggled, suspended between faith and doubt.  And then an online friend directed me to the Doxa website.  "Doxa" means "glory," and the website author, scholar/theologian Joe Hinman (who calls himself "Metacrock" online) showed me that the real problem was that I was letting the skeptics determine the rules of engagement, playing the rationalists' game on their own playing field.

They said my God was a big imaginary friend in the sky.  They made it sound so silly. But Doxa helped me see that I didn't-- and needn't-- believe in that little straw-man deity anyway.

The scientific rationalists said I needed to question all my assumptions.  But I began to understand that they were leaving most of their own assumptions unquestioned.  Could their assertion that everything that is real can be scientifically verified, itself be scientifically verified?

If I must doubt my faith, couldn't I also doubt their skepticism?

"Why should  I mistrust my own experiences of God's presence?" Joe Hinman taught me to ask. After all, we don't mistrust other things we experience.  We don't doubt that the chair we're sitting in will hold us, unless we have some good reason to think something has gone wrong with our senses.  We don't have to accept the self-proclaimed expert in science as an expert in metaphysics.  Nor need we accept the standard of "absolute proof" in terms of scientific categories that may be inadequate for the phenomenon in the first place.  We can have good, reasonable reasons -- what Hinman calls a "rational warrant" to believe.  His newer website, The Religious A Priori, explores belief and rational warrant from a number of different angles.

And now Joe Hinman has encapsulated some of his best thinking into a new book: The Trace of God: A Rational Warrant for Belief.

The Trace of God is a scholarly work, but written in a style that a layperson can follow.  Its main point is that experiences like the one I describe above (called "religious experiences" or "peak experiences"*) do constitute good evidence, even from a scientific point of view, of the existence of God.

God can't be absolutely proven, Hinman says, because God is "not just another thing in the universe." God is the source and foundation of everything material and empirical; God is not material himself, nor is the sense of God conveyed in human empirical senses such as sight or hearing.  Instead we must look for the "co-determinate":

The co-determinate is like. . . a fingerprint.  The trace is the sign that always accompanies the thing itself.  In other words, you can't see the invisible man, but you can see his footprints, and wherever he is in the snow his footprints will always follow.  We cannot directly observe God, but we can find the "trace," the co-determinate, the effect of God in the world. [p. 67]

Religious experience, and especially "peak" experience, is that footprint in the snow.  Hinman spends several chapters detailing the methodology and findings of the many careful scientific/sociological studies that have measured and quantified religious experience.  He details the real, empirical effects of these studies on those who experience them, in terms of their "ultimate, transformative effects":

The effects of these experiences are dramatic, positive and long-term. . . There is data to suggest that religious experience has enabled addicts to get off of heroin, alcoholics to stop drinking and even helps people quit smoking. . . [there is] a clear feeling of meaning in life. Many speak of losing their fear of death. [p. 85]

Hinman goes on (pp. 88-89) to highlight the findings of several studies showing that those who have peak experiences:

• Are less likely to value material possessions and money or status
• Give greater value to work for social change, solving social problems, helping the needy
• Are reflective, inner-directed, self-aware, self-confident
• Are less authoritarian and dogmatic**
• Exhibit integration, allocentrism
• Exhibit psychological maturity
• Show self-acceptance, self-worth
• Exhibit autonomy, authenticity
• Experience increased love and compassion

Hinman then spends several more chapters exploring the views of dissenting thinkers and alternate explanations for these transformative effects, and explaining why authentic experience of the divine is the explanation that most reasonably fits the phenomena.  For instance, the fact that children often have spontaneous peak experiences precludes the idea that this is a specialized state of mind caused by the self-discipline of meditation.

Finally, at the end of the book he addresses how his understanding of religious and peak experience (which can and does occur in all religious traditions and even happens at times to the non-religious) fits into a Christian viewpoint.  Hinman is himself an orthodox Christian, though he does not identify with the evangelical tradition.

I found the book enlightening and uplifting, and was also intrigued to find that the incident in my backyard under the stars was a quintessential "peak experience."  It certainly has had transformative effects on my life! I am less fearful of the future, more anchored and confident, and better able to navigate the trials of life (not that I never doubt or have disappointments in my faith, but that my memories of that time are something I can always fall back on).

As Hinman puts it:

[R]eligious experience enables us to know who we are and where we are going, fills us with purpose and gives us the sense that our lives are on track. . . It also enables us to face life's trammels and bitter experiences.  The upshot of the argument is that RE [religious experience] works for navigation in the world. . . it helps us live and make choices and keep going in a complex world. . . . [ p. 100]

I was honored to be one of those who got to preview this exciting book (which is now available for purchase).  I hope many of my readers will enjoy it too.


-----------------------

*Note: Hinman uses the term "religious experience" to describe a variety of experiences on a sliding scale from the frequently felt sensation of a presence in prayer or worship, to the more rare, apex-type experience (what happened to me in my backyard is an example). This latter type he calls "peak experience" after Abraham Maslow's "M-scale" studies; see for instance p. 86.

**Note: The Trace of God is not concerned with cultic, authoritarian or spiritually abusive forms of religious involvement; indeed, my only real criticism of the book is that I think Hinman should have spent a little more time on the existence of this type of religious practice and its nearly opposite, negative effects, in order to differentiate this from normative religious experience.  However, he does briefly mention (as I myself have experienced) that often it is genuine religious experience that helps people endure and move out of authoritarian religious control.

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*** UPDATE:  Other bloggers' reviews of this terrific book are also now online.

N. K. Johel at Bollywood Storm

Jason Pratt at Evangelical Universalist

Reading The Dark Is Rising as an Adult Christian

When the Dark comes rising, six shall turn it back,
Three from the circle, three from the track;
Wood, bronze, iron, water, fire, stone;
Five shall return, and one go alone.
- Susan Cooper, The Dark is Rising, 1973

I first read The Dark is Rising (a children's book series written by Susan Cooper, and also the title of one of the books in that series) when I was 12 or 13.  I can't remember exactly how old I was.  What I can remember is how completely I was enthralled; it was one of those books that I lost myself in, so completely within that world that I forgot who and where I was and simply lived in the book, emerging for a gasp of real-world air and a snack every now and then, or when my parents annoyingly required something mundane of me, like setting the table or going to sleep.  The Dark Is Rising series is about a young English boy named Will who finds he has a special destiny related to the myths and legends of ancient Britain, about three other children named Simon, Jane and Barney who help him, and about a mysterious old man named Merriman who guides the plot towards its ultimate end.

When I was 15 I became a Christian.  I described that experience earlier in this blog-- but one thing that happened as I became more involved in the church and more enmeshed in evangelical Christian counter-culture was that I learned to be wary and suspicious of all forms of literature, music and art that were not overtly Christian.  I remember pulling my copy of The Dark Is Rising off a bookshelf at my parents' house when I was temporarily home from college, and shuddering at a scene where the forces of evil ("the Dark") attack during a Christmas service at the village Anglican church:

Farmer Dawson said very quietly but clearly from the group beside the door, "No, Rector." 

The rector seemed not to hearing him.  His eyes were wide, staring out at the snow. . . He managed to half-raise one arm and point behind him: ". . . vestry. . ." he gasped out. ". . . book, on table. . . exorcise. . . " 

"Poor brave fellow," said John Smith in the Old Speech.  "This battle is not for his fighting."

And then the Old Ones, the more-than-human beings whose destiny it is to war for the Light, place the rector in an oblivious trance and then fight off the forces of the Dark and restore peace.  The rector and his Christianity are neither friends nor enemies; they are simply irrelevant.  Later Will explains to the rector that

"Everything that matters is outside Time.  And comes from there and can go there. . the part of all of us, and of all the things we think and believe, that has nothing to do with yesterday or today or tomorrow because it belongs at a different kind of level. . . . And all Gods are there, and all the things they have ever stood for.  And the opposite, too."

The college-age me got rid of the entire set of books and decided never to read them again.

But I always remembered the effect this series had had on me when I was younger.  The sheer beauty of the settings and descriptions, the honesty and loyalty of the characters, the poetic justice and fulfillment of the exciting conclusion to each segment.  Still, good Christians didn't read neo-pagan books, and there seemed little doubt that The Dark Is Rising was neo-pagan.

This year, though, in the spirit of "testing everything and holding fast to what is good" (1 Thess. 5:21), I decided to pick up the books again.  I know the context of that 1 Thessalonians passage is about "not despising prophetic utterances" and "staying away from every form of evil," but I think the principle can be applied to many things.  I don't actually know, now, whether Susan Cooper is neo-pagan or not; she is reticent about her beliefs on her website and in her interviews.  But she does say in The Camelot Project interview that in The Dark is Rising series

I had to move away from [too close a parallel to King Arthur] because it seems to me that the Arthurian legend is parallel to the Christian story of the leader who dies for our salvation. Whereas what my books were trying to say is that nobody else can save us. We have to save ourselves.

Still, is there really nothing such an author can say to me, nothing in her books worth reading?   Especially if the author is a critically acclaimed, award-winning writer, for obvious reasons? 

I can no longer accept such a simplistic view of reality.

The thing is that, both now and when I was a child, I could recognize that these books are not a "form of evil" to be avoided per 1 Thess. 5:21.  There is the homely goodness of a scene like this:

On Christmas night, Will always slept with [his brother] James. The twin beds were still in James's room from the time before Will had moved [upstairs]. . . There was something about Christmas Eve, they felt, that demanded company; one needed somebody to whisper to, during the warm beautiful dream-taut moments between hanging the empty stocking at the end of the bed, and dropping into the cosy oblivion that would flower into the marvel of Christmas morning.

Or the ethereal grace of this:

The mare wheeled towards him, snuffling a greeting, and in the same enchanted, music-haunted moment as before, Will was up on the white horse of the Light, sitting in front of Merriman.  The ship tilted and swung, fully afloat now, and the white horse wheeled out of its way to stand nearby. . . So the mysterious king lay in dignity still, among his weapons and gleaming tribute, and Will had a glimpse of the mask-like white face as the great ship moved away downstream. . . watching the light glimmer on the golden stag of the prow.

And there is the uncompromising commitment to preserving the dignity and freedom of the ordinary individual in the face of dark forces that seek to control and enslave-- a theme arising out of Cooper's childhood in beleaguered England in the midst of the Second World War.  There is a quiet celebration of the love of family and the friendship of dogs, of the small English village and the rocky Cornish coastlands.  And finally, there is the humor mixed into the magic like salt into soup:

"Too much punch," said James, as his tall brother stretched gaping [yawning] in an armchair.
"Get lost," said Robin amiably.
"Who'd like a mince pie?" said Mrs. Stanton, coming in with a vast tray of cocoa mugs.
"James has had six already," said Mary in prim disapproval. "At the Manor."
"Now it's eight," said James, with a mince pie in each hand. "Yah.". . .
"Ho-ho-ho," said Will sepulchrally from the floor.  "Good little children never fight at Christmas." And since Mary was irresistably close to him, he grabbed her by the ankle. She collapsed on top of him, howling cheerfully.
"Mind the fire," said Mrs. Stanton, from years of habit.

It turns out that my Christianity is not as fragile as the church once led me to believe.  I'm not going to leave the faith because I read a book by an author who doesn't share it.  And my disagreement with some of her premises need not negate my enjoyment of, and even edification from, the joys of life and love and the beauties of courage and hope which she depicts so well.

The Protestant doctrine of common grace says that God's mercies are over all the world and that God's gifts and talents are spread generously among all people.  There is nothing to fear from a manifestation of that grace in any person, whether they agree with my theology or not.  The world is wider-- and God is bigger!-- than the narrow conceptions I had in the youth of my faith.

So I'm happy to once again call myself a fan of Susan Cooper and The Dark is Rising.  To have come full circle back to the pleasure I had as a child in a really good story.

And to find the footprints of Christ there, as I may find them anywhere.

I really don't think Ms. Cooper would mind.