[Dialogue] 3/02/2023, Progressing Spirit: Dr. Carl KriegThe Birth and Death of the First Century Church - Part 2; Spong revisited
Ellie Stock
elliestock at aol.com
Thu Mar 2 09:33:41 PST 2023
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screen and (max-width:480px){#yiv3756079761 #yiv3756079761templateBody .yiv3756079761mcnTextContent, #yiv3756079761 #yiv3756079761templateBody .yiv3756079761mcnTextContent p{font-size:14px !important;line-height:150% !important;}}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){#yiv3756079761 #yiv3756079761templateFooter .yiv3756079761mcnTextContent, #yiv3756079761 #yiv3756079761templateFooter .yiv3756079761mcnTextContent p{font-size:12px !important;line-height:150% !important;}} By Dr. Carl Krieg
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The Birth and Death of the
First Century Church - Part 2
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| Essay by Dr. Carl Krieg
March 2, 2023In the first part of this essay we saw how Jesus was able to impact the disciples and also how the disciples were changed and lived a transformed life apart from the Passion narrative. We now turn to analyzing how the rich and powerful handed us the story of Jesus that we have today.Continuing where we left off: Part Three: Takeover by the Rich and Powerful6. If we ask how the traditional story came to be dominant, the answer is that the rich and powerful of the day infiltrated and overpowered the leadership of the fledgling community and also transformed its thinking.Jesus’ message was that the essence of the universe is love, that a life of love is a life of happiness, and that such happiness and love is incompatible with the oppression and injustice rampant in society. Incompatible. Such an outlook threatened the rich and powerful, who benefitted from the system of oppression, and they fought back. They had killed Jesus, believing that the loss of the leader would destroy the movement, but they miscalculated, and the movement only grew. Their next tactic involved both taking over leadership positions and distorting the story, a double maneuver that worked splendidly, the outcome lasting to this very day. The easiest way for us to understand their success is to compare the real story with the traditional story and thereby discover how the traditional story handed down to us was of benefit to the wealthy. Not long ago I was uncertain whether the changing of the story was due to influence on the part of the rich, or if it was simply a matter of social inertia, i.e. if you don’t work to change the situation, it stays the same. Seeing how the rich and powerful operate in today’s world, I am inclined to accept the theory of influence. The question, of course, is whether the influence was purposeful and intentional, conscious and deliberate, or whether it was subconscious. We’ll probably never know, but in either case, certain factors certainly came into play.To begin with, there was nothing in the economic system that would have encouraged justice and equality. Patronage guaranteed that one’s responsibility was to those to whom one was beholden, not to the poorer below. And those above made their living, so to speak, by taking from the poor. The rich and powerful had no economic incentive to liberate anyone from the oppression that formed the linchpin of the system.Beyond economic incentive, however, was the psychology of being rich. Studies in neuroscience have shown that wealth affects the operation of a human brain. There are at least three such influences: a sense of entitlement, lack of empathy, and addiction. Beginning with the last, money and its accumulation are addictive. Once one passes the amount required for a comfortable life, the search for more easily becomes an obsession. Whatever inclination to share that might have been present initially, is overpowered by the urge to accumulate ever more. This addiction is accompanied by both a growing sense of entitlement and a lack of empathy for those less fortunate. The sense of entitlement refers not only to the attitude epitomized by the comment “I worked hard for my money”, but also to the attitude that because I am rich, I have certain rights and privileges not available to others. Royalty and corrupt politicians glaringly exemplify the condescension. In such a mental framework, empathy for the less fortunate is impossible.Given the power that wealth wields over the minds of those who possess it, most probably the regression of the early church didn’t “just happen”, but was, rather, intentional on the part of those in society who were already in control. But whether by intent or inertia, the system did not give way to the Way of Jesus, and the story that emerged was not a story of transformation but rather one that stymied transformation. In this sense, Jesus stands in a long line of Old Testament prophets who spoke out strongly against the injustice prevalent in the land, only to be ridiculed, stoned, and killed for their efforts. We now turn to the specifics of this takeover.7. The leadership of the community began to reflect the interests of the rich and powerful.It seems clear that the first century saw great change in the organization of the church community. However the first groups were organized, be they wandering bands, home churches, or families of friends, at least some soon developed into larger organizations with a hierarchy that included priests and bishops. This institution represented the interests of the wealthy class as reflected in the writings of the time, such as the pastoral epistles. [The book of James and the community therein portrayed seems an outlier to this trend.] The stories about Jesus that had initially circulated orally now became codified in writings, and these writings in turn were interpreted for the congregations by the priests and bishops. Those who knew Jesus personally had a certain authority in the earliest community. But as they were replaced by a second generation, the source of authority shifted, and became similar to what one finds in society. Through this system, the rich and powerful assumed control of a movement that had previously been a threat.8. The rich and powerful led the way for the early church to believe that the death of Jesus was not the economic/political empire’s execution of a revolutionary troublemaker, but instead was the way God had chosen to save us from our sins.We all know that Pilate gave the order to have Jesus executed as a criminal against the state. And we all know that the church at the end of the first century found the death of Jesus to be an atoning sacrifice. If you think about it, that’s quite the transition: from trouble-making revolutionary to sacrificial lamb. We have let ourselves think that the early church became so distraught at the death of Jesus that they searched for ways to make sense of the event. And so, in so doing, they discovered in Isaiah and elsewhere words that might apply to the situation, eg, [he was bruised for our iniquity, etc], and concluded that it was all God’s plan, as foretold by the prophets. But if the stayers and the movers on had all been transformed by Jesus into proponents of a new society and severe critics of the old, certainly they were aware that crucifixion was a possibility, if not a probability. They expected trouble; it neither surprised nor discouraged them, even though it must have frightened them. It must have been the later converts, those who became new followers without realizing the revolutionary impetus inspired by Jesus, who succumbed to the devious explanations for the crucifixion offered by the power structure. 9. The rich and powerful deluded the early church into believing that the revolutionary impact of Jesus was not with the transformative power that lived on in the new Movement, but rather was a single event that happened to him when he walked out of a tomb.There is a huge difference between believing that the meaning of your life is to be found in a loving, caring and sharing community that works to transform society, and believing that you will go to heaven because Jesus opened the door and will come for you at some future time. This difference greatly benefits those who control the current system of oppression and seek to maintain the status quo. Reducing the on-going power of the spirit to an empty tomb saps the revolution of its energy and puts God on the side of established order.Some other dimensions of the takeover.10. It is impossible to imagine Jesus speaking positively of slavery, and yet the later church required that slaves be obedient to their masters, no matter how cruel. Such a rule would certainly have benefitted those who gained financially from the system.11. We know that there were probably a dozen women who were integral to the family of friends gathered by Jesus. They played a huge role, supporting the group with their money and ministering to Jesus. And yet, in the later church, we find prohibitions forbidding women to even speak in church and demanding submission to their husbands. Why? Must it not be because patriarchy was essential to the economic system, and those men now had the power in the community?12. We have become accustomed to believe that Jesus had twelve male disciples, eyewitnesses to his life who became the apostolic pillars of the later institution, modeled after the twelve tribes of Israel. This is certainly a creation of the rich and powerful men who relied on the system of patriarchy. Jesus had women disciples, pure and simple.13. Initially it seems that the earliest Christian communities shared a supper, rich and poor together, as both a real, physical sharing, and also a symbol of the reign of God wherein all were equal. We gather from Paul that at least in Corinth the common meal had deteriorated to the point where the wealthy came early, ate and drank their fill, and, inebriated, left the poor to their own devices. That is bad enough, but even the pretense of equality was soon thrown by the wayside as the actual meal was reinterpreted as a sacramental meal that involved no real sharing at all. Commonality of all, rich and poor alike, became individualized communion with God without any economic implications as the wealthy were in no way obligated to share their bounty. 14. The life and teaching of Jesus was subversive. Were that not the case, he never would have been crucified. The church of the later first century reversed that subversion and demanded that everyone be subject to the governing authorities. And the governing authorities no doubt represented the rich and powerful. SummaryWe began with a description of human nature and used that to try to understand who Jesus was and how he was able to impact people, an analysis that bypasses much of the traditional theology about who and what he was. From there we moved on to examining the two types of disciples and how their lives question the centrality of the Passion story in Christian theology. We then looked at the many ways that the rich and powerful utilized to return the radical message of Jesus back to the confirmation of the existing power structure, a place we have remained ever since. The question we must ask ourselves is whether the Story we have been handed is what really happened.
~ Dr. Carl Krieg
Read online here
About the AuthorDr. Carl Krieg received his BA from Dartmouth College, MDiv from Union Theological Seminary in NYC, and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago Divinity School. He is the author of What to Believe? the Questions of Christian Faith, The Void and the Vision and The New Matrix: How the World We Live In Impacts Our Thinking About Self and God. As professor and pastor, Dr. Krieg has taught innumerable classes and led many discussion groups. He lives with his wife Margaret in Norwich, VT. |
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Question & Answer
Q: By Bill
Judgement? Can we say someone is not a Christian by watching their behavior, or would we be judging, which is not ours to do?
A: By Rev. Jim Burklo Dear Bill,It’s understandable that folks would question the bona fides of others who claim to be Christian, given that so many of them fail to live up to the example of the Christ they so stridently claim to follow.
But that kind of judgment is a stumbling block for those of us trying to follow the way of Jesus.
If we think of Christianity as a bulwark with walls, then we define who is in and who is out. But if Christianity is centered on divine love, naturally attracting people toward the Ultimate Reality of compassion, then there are no boundaries, no dogmatic definitions of who is Christian and who is not, who is out and who is in.
Progressive Christianity, at its best, affirms this perspective of the faith. We are all Bozos on Jesus’ bus, and that’s okay. Not one of us is a perfect mirror of the divine agape at the center of our faith.
While we preach and teach a progressive, non-dogmatic, pluralistic perspective of the faith, we are called to welcome all sorts of humans into our churches. Fundamentalists, evangelicals, atheists, agnostics, people of other faiths, Republicans, Democrats, socialists, capitalists, flat-earthers, anti-vaxxers – and certainly we welcome hypocrites. Because to one degree or another, that’s all of us. We all espouse values we fail to reflect in our behavior.
If your church doesn’t have some members you find hypocritical, funky, or outright obnoxious, go look for another church. Because the church is supposed to be a fitness center for love. And if there aren’t some folks in your church who are hard to love, then you are missing out on the heavy lifting that will build up your spiritual muscles.
To follow the way of Jesus, a sense of humor is very helpful. Because comedy abounds in a faith that attracts us toward ideals that are nigh unto impossible to put fully into effect. Our best response to people who claim to be Christian but don’t seem to act the part is to smile –appreciating the irony of their failure, and of our own failure, to love as Jesus did.~ Rev. Jim Burklo
Read and share online here
About the Author
Rev. Jim Burklo is the Executive Director of Progressive Christians Uniting, which is now organizing ZOE, a national network of progressive Christian ministries at colleges and universities. He is the founder of Souljourning.org, providing resources for families to nurture the natural spirituality of young people. He retired as the Senior Associate Dean of Religious and Spiritual Life at the University of Southern California in 2022 and now serves as pastor of the United Church of Christ of Simi Valley, CA. An ordained pastor in the United Church of Christ, he is the author of seven published books on progressive Christianity. His latest is Tenderly Calling: An Invitation to the Way of Jesus. His weekly blog, “Musings,” has a global readership. He is an honorary advisor and frequent content contributor for ProgressiveChristianity.org. Jim and his wife Roberta live in Ojai, CA. |
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Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited
Part V Matthew: Isolating This Gospel from All the Others
Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong
October 31, 2013Having now introduced you to a different way of reading the gospel of Matthew, and puncturing for you, I hope forever, the assumption that this book along with all the other gospels was ever intended to be either history or biography, I want in this column to double back and focus on the gospel of Matthew as a whole. My purpose now is to isolate this gospel from all of the others so that we might see it in its pristine uniqueness. What does Matthew’s gospel contribute to the developing Christian story? Where in this gospel has the author introduced new ideas, new stories or new concepts that have never before been heard in Christian circles? Most people, I fear, know the Christian story only as one grand, homogenized blend and they have no idea what parts of the Jesus tradition are the gifts of the various gospel writers. Today I seek to separate Matthew from everything else in the Christian tradition and force it to stand alone.
First, the date of this work needs to be established. Most scholars tend to date this gospel in the middle years of the ninth decade, or in the 82-86 CE year range. It is all but universally agreed that the author of Matthew was familiar with the gospel of Mark. He clearly used Mark and quoted from it directly although expanding it considerably. Most scholars date Luke well after Matthew, the consensus being perhaps a decade later, but with a minority making the radical suggestion that Luke might be as late as 140 CE. The intensely Jewish character of Matthew’s gospel is also generally acknowledged. It appears to be the most traditionally Jewish of all the gospels. Matthew’s portrayal of Jesus in passionate debate with the Pharisees also tends to support a date in the middle years of the ninth decade when Pharisaic power was dominant in the land of the Jews. A coterie of biblical scholars believe quite firmly that the author of this gospel was in fact a Jewish scribe, who had become a follower of Jesus and who served as the head of a congregation of Jewish Christians somewhere in one of the more urban centers of Syria, perhaps around Antioch. There is even some agreement among scholars that the author of this gospel has placed a self-revealing, autobiographical note into his text in which he identifies himself as a scribe: “Therefore, every scribe, who has been trained for the Kingdom of Heaven, is like a householder who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old” (Matt, 13:52). Certainly this gospel reveals a passion for things Jewish and an openness to dramatically new Christian understandings.
I will begin this phase of Matthean study simply by listing in bullet-point form the things about this gospel that are unique to this gospel.
* Matthew is the first gospel writer to trace the ancestral line that produced Jesus of Nazareth. He opens his account with seventeen rather boring verses of “who begat whoms.” We will return to these verses later in this series for they contain some powerful interpretive clues, but for now we simply note that it was important for Matthew and for his community to ground Jesus in the DNA of Judaism. Jesus is portrayed as the son of Abraham, the father of the Hebrew nation, who left his home in Ur of the Chaldees to form a new people in the wilderness. Abraham was said to have made a covenant with the God who called him to this new place. Jesus in this genealogy is also designated the son of David, a fact the served to establish his messianic credentials, for a major piece of Jewish messianic thinking was that the promised deliverer had to restore the throne of David. Jesus was also said to have been descended from survivors of the Babylonian Exile. Matthew thus rooted Jesus in the crucial events of Jewish history.
* Matthew is the first New Testament writer to introduce the story of the Virgin Birth. The idea that Jesus had a miraculous birth had never before been mentioned. Since this gospel was not written until the 9th decade of the Christian era we are forced to acknowledge that the idea of a Virgin Birth for Jesus is a very late developing tradition and thus not part of original Christianity. Paul, who wrote between 51-64 CE, had clearly never heard of this miraculous birth tradition. He refers to Jesus only as one who was “born of a woman” like every other person, and “born under the law” like every other Jew. Mark, the first gospel to be written (ca.72 CE), also appears to know nothing about a miraculous birth tradition. Mark even portrays the mother of the adult Jesus as thinking that he was mentally disturbed (Mark 3:31-35). That is hardly the stance of one who was told that she would be the mother of the Son of God. So, embrace the fact that Matthew is the gospel writer who introduces the Virgin Birth tradition into Christianity. Please note the fact that only in Matthew do we find stories about a star in the east, the journey of the magi, the slaughter of the innocent children by Herod, the flight of the infant Jesus into Egypt and the subsequent settlement of the holy family in the Galilean village of Nazareth.
* Matthew is the first Christian writer to introduce Joseph as the earthly father of Jesus. This Joseph was also destined to disappear from the Jesus story almost immediately after he plays his role in the birth narrative.
Matthew alone suggests that Jesus preached “The Sermon on the Mount.”
* Matthew introduces a number of parables into his narrative that no one else in the developing Christian tradition seems ever to have heard or known. Among them are the parable of the weeds (13:24-20), the parable of the hidden treasure and the parable of the pearl of great price (13:44-46), the parable of the net (13:47-50), the parable of the householder (13:51-52), the parable of the unmerciful servant (18:23-25), the parable of the laborers in the vineyard (20:1-16) and, probably the best known of all the Matthew parables, the parable of the judgment in which the sheep and the goats are separated (25:31-46).
* Matthew alone adds to the biography of Judas Iscariot the narrative of his receiving thirty pieces of silver for his act of betrayal, the narrative of Judas repenting and trying to return the money and the narrative of his act of committing suicide by hanging.
* Matthew alone asserts that guards were placed around the tomb of Jesus to prevent the disciples from stealing his body and then using that story to fuel resurrection fantasies. One of those fantasies was that the descending angel struck the guards causing them to sink into a state of unconsciousness while the angel removed the stone from the entrance to the tomb.
* Matthew was the first New Testament writer to narrate the details of the risen Christ appearing to anyone. Please note that this means that appearance stories of the resurrected Jesus do not enter the Christian tradition until the ninth decade. In Matthew’s first narrated resurrection story, Matthew has the risen Christ appear to the women at the tomb at dawn on the first Easter morning. That is of special interest since Mark, who wrote earlier than Matthew, and Luke, who wrote later, both say that the women did not see Jesus at the tomb on Easter morning.
* Matthew is the first gospel writer to describe the actual appearance of the risen Jesus to the disciples. Matthew tells us that this appearance took place in Galilee on a mountain top, not in Jerusalem at the tomb, and that Jesus appeared to them from out of the sky already glorified. He was not a resuscitated body appearing out of a grave. Since the story of Jesus’ ascension does not enter the tradition until Luke, a decade or so later, this scene argues strongly that the earliest conception of resurrection was not that of a physical, resuscitated body rising from the grave back into the life of this world, but rather of one who had somehow been transformed into the eternal life of God from which he could be manifested in some visionary way to certain chosen witnesses. That puts the resurrection of Jesus into the Old Testament category that was believed to have included Enoch, Moses and Elijah.
* Matthew is the first gospel to quote the resurrected Jesus as speaking. Before Matthew he had said nothing to anyone. The words Matthew quoted him as saying were what we now call “the Great Commission.” That commission had two parts, a command and a promise. The command was to go into all the world, make disciples of all nations, baptize and teach them to observe “all that I have commanded you.” The promise was that they would never be alone, for the risen Lord was quoted as saying: “Lo, I am with you always, even to the close of the age.” Matthew has no concept of the Holy Spirit coming after Jesus has departed, no sense of a “comforter,” who would replace him as appears in the later gospels of Luke and John. The closest thing to Pentecost that Matthew offers is this promise of the eternal presence of the living Christ. Matthew opened his gospel with an angel stating that Jesus would be called “Emmanuel,” meaning “God with you.” The circle is completed in Matthew when Jesus makes this claim for himself: I am Emmanuel, the eternal presence of God, who will be “with you always to the end of the age.” The Christ presence is thus Matthew’s version of the Holy Spirit.
Those are some of the distinguishing marks of the gospel we call Matthew. Embrace its uniqueness and listen to its special contributions. We will examine them all in more detail as this series of columns unfolds.
For now, grasp first the Jewishness of this gospel and then grasp the fact that at the beginning of his Jesus story Matthew shows Gentiles in the persons of the Wise Men, compelled to come and worship this Jewish Jesus and at the end of his gospel Matthew portrays the risen Jesus commanding his followers to go to the Gentiles to make disciples of all nations. It is inside that interpretive envelope of the Gentiles coming to Jesus and then the disciples being sent to the Gentiles that Matthew’s story of Jesus of Nazareth unfolds.~ John Shelby Spong |
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