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!important;line-height:150% !important;} }@media screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv0137801257 #yiv0137801257templateBody .yiv0137801257mcnTextContent, #yiv0137801257 #yiv0137801257templateBody .yiv0137801257mcnTextContent p{ font-size:14px !important;line-height:150% !important;} }@media screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv0137801257 #yiv0137801257templateFooter .yiv0137801257mcnTextContent, #yiv0137801257 #yiv0137801257templateFooter .yiv0137801257mcnTextContent p{ font-size:12px !important;line-height:150% !important;} } Many Christians struggle with both concepts.
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The Concepts of the Virgin Birth
and Physical Resurrection
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| Essay by Rev. Irene Monroe
June 13, 2019
Both the virgin birth and physical resurrection are the pillars of the Christian faith, and many Christians struggle with both concepts.
The Virgin Birth
As a present-day feminist theologian, I take issue with the androcentric canonization of the virgin birth narrative as either a misinterpreted text, at best, or a fictive tale, at worst. Jesus born of a virgin upholds religious patriarchy at the expense of demeaning women and justifying keeping us in non-powerful positions within the church. The traditional rendering of this narrative creates two competing and unrealistic female archetypes - sinful Eve and virginal Mary. Both of these archetypes denigrate and dismiss women’s sexuality and sexual desire; they spill out into society, impacting social issues like reproductive justice, sex work, same-sex relationships, to name a few. And these archetypes are harmful in the psychosexual development of young girls.
Mary’s miraculous pregnancy, the Christian belief that Jesus was conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit and born to a virgin mother, conceals a reality that Mary might have been sexually active, seduced or raped-that would not be contested in today’s #Me Too Movement. A virgin birth is not biologically possible. Without Matthew 1:23 and Luke 1:27 we would know nothing about it, because it’s not mentioned in the rest of the New Testament, and never mentioned in Paul’s epistles.
This narrative man-splains a religious shift toward biblical inerrancy and blind obedience of scripture, versus employing a reasoned faith that asked questions. “The faith in the Virgin Birth reflects the way American Christianity is becoming less intellectual and more mystical over time,” the New York Times columnist, Nicholas Kristof, wrote. “The Virgin Mary is an interesting prism through which to examine America’s emphasis on faith, because most Biblical scholars regard the evidence for the Virgin Birth … as so shaky that it pretty much has to be a leap of faith.”
The Hebrew meaning of the word ”virgin” means a young woman of childbearing age, which has nothing to do with virginity. The 1970 version of Isaiah 7:14 says “the virgin shall be with child, and bear a son, and shall name him Immanuel.” In translation it would read the following: A young woman of childbearing age shall be with child, and bear a son, and shall name him Immanuel (Hebrew for “God is with us”).
Mary was an unwed mother who gave birth to a child. This phenomenon occurs in everyday life, and has been occurring since before Jesus was born.
The Physical Resurrection
Jesus’s physical resurrection from his crucifixion is a fantastical tale. The narrative is framed within both Jewish and Christian apocalyptic literature as both metaphoric and mystic.
I preach about Jesus’s resurrection as a way to examine social injustices confronting marginal and disenfranchised people; for socially conscious Christians to think anew about a topic, and then act to bring about change.
For example, it would be an egregious omission to gloss over the unrelenting violence that took place during Jesus’s time, especially in light of the ongoing violence in today’s society toward people of color, women, Jews, Muslims, and LGBTQ people, to name a few. However, the deification of violence as a resurrection narrative that has been spun as redemptive suffering has deleterious implications that are not-so-benignly played out today from the playground to the courtroom.
The normative rendering of the resurrection text, in my opinion, desensitizes killing, giving rise not only to a cavalier attitude to kill those who pose a physical threat to our lives, but also giving rise to a self-righteous attitude to kill those who are believed to pose social and political threats to the status quo.
In other words, the notion of equating violence to redemptive suffering is not only bad theology, it is also a bad paradigm to demonstrate how God, who so loved the world that he offered up his only begotten son to save all of humanity, sacrificed him in the form of a sadomasochistic flogging. Jesus suffered before and during his walk up the hill to Golgotha at Calvary.
Without the contextualization and accountability of the violence enacted upon Jesus, cycles of violence continue in the world. As a figure that has dominated Western culture and Christianity for over 2,000 years, too little attention is paid to Jesus's death. If more focus was spent on the reasons for his death and the systems of oppression that brought about his demise, violence against marginalized people would cease to exist.
However, by focusing on the death of Jesus, and how justice might be adjudicated from it, we are forced to remember history. In the year 33 A.D., Jesus was unquestionably a religious threat to conservative Jews because of his iconoclastic views and practice of Jewish Law. He was viewed as a political threat to the Roman government simply because he was a Jew.
In other words, in conservative Christianity, the cross as the locus of God’s atonement for human sin raises a myriad of questions for those of us on the margins of society. As an instrument for execution by Roman officials during Jesus's time, the cross's symbolic nature and its symbolic value can both be seen as the valorization of suffering and abuse, especially in the lives of the oppressed.
For those of us on the margins, a Christology mounted on the belief that "Jesus died on the cross for our sins," instead of "Jesus died on the cross because of our sins," not only deifies Jesus as the suffering servant, but it also ritualizes suffering as redemptive. While suffering points to the need for redemption, suffering in and of itself is not redemptive, and it does not always correlate to one's sinfulness. For example, the belief that undeserved suffering is endured by faith, and that it has a morally educative component to, it makes the powerful insensitive to the suffering of others, and it forces the less powerful to be complacent to their suffering - therefore, maintaining the status quo.
Jesus' suffering on the cross should never be seen as redemptive any more than the suffering of African-American men dangling from trees in the South during Jim Crow America. The lynchings of African-American men were never as restitution for the sins of the Ku Klux Klan, but were, instead, because of their sins that went, for decades, unaccounted for. In other words, Jesus's death on the cross and the lynching of African-American are synonymous experiences.
As a profoundly controversial icon in Christian liberation theologies for many feminists, womanists, African Americans, and LGBTQ people, the cross is the locus of redemption, insofar as it serves as a lens to critically examine and make the connections between the abuses of power and institutions of domination that brought about the suffering Jesus endured during his time. As well as, to the abuses of power and institutions of domination that bring about the suffering which women, people of color and sexual minorities are enduring in our present day.
When suffering is understood as an ongoing cycle of abuse that goes on unexamined and unaccounted for, we can then begin to see its manifestation in systems of racism, sexism, classism, and heterosexism in our everyday lives. With a new understanding about suffering and how it victimizes the innocent and it aborts the Christian mission of inclusiveness, Jesus’s death at Calvary and his resurrection invite a different hermeneutic than its classically held one.
Many Christians do not realize that with the classical view of the cross held by many conservatives in their denominations as the exaltation of Jesus as male, Jesus as white, and Jesus as heterosexual, this view not only disinvites the many faces of God that should appear on the cross with Jesus, but it also disinvites solidarity among diverse groups of people who do suffer.~ Rev. Irene Monroe
Read online here
About the Author
The Reverend Monroe is an ordained minister. She does a weekly Monday segment, “All Revved Up!” on WGBH (89.7 FM), a Boston member station of National Public Radio (NPR), that is now a podcast, and a weekly Friday commentator on New England Channel NEWS (NECN). Monroe is the Boston voice for Detour’s African American Heritage Trail, Guided Walking Tour of Beacon Hill: Boston’s Black Women Abolitionists (Boston) – Detour.
Monroe’s a Huffington Post blogger and a syndicated religion columnist. Her columns appear in cities across the country and in the U.K, Ireland, Canada. Monroe writes a column in the Boston home LGBTQ newspaper Baywindows, Cambridge Chronicle, and Opinion pieces for the Boston Globe.
Monroe stated that her “columns are an interdisciplinary approach drawing on critical race theory, African American, queer and religious studies. As a religion columnist I try to inform the public of the role religion plays in discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people. Because homophobia is both a hatred of the “other” and it’s usually acted upon ‘in the name of religion,” by reporting religion in the news I aim to highlight how religious intolerance and fundamentalism not only shatters the goal of American democracy, but also aids in perpetuating other forms of oppression such as racism, sexism, classism and anti-Semitism.” Her papers are at the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe College’s research library on the history of women in America. Click here to visit her website. |
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Question & Answer
Q: By Marlon
What “exactly” is an atheist?
A: By Rev. Gretta Vosper
Dear Marlon,
Just as the term “believer” means very different things to those who use it, so do to does the word “atheist” include a wide set of definitions. I’m digging into it in a fairly technical way here, but I hope it helps.
There are different groups who use the term “atheist” and each uses it in a different way.
Theologians
Theologians might use the word "atheist" to describe a belief system that excludes the idea that the god called God is a being and is supernatural. They may acknowledge an idea of god, but not one that intervenes in human affairs (directly or by changing people minds so that they act differently).
In my first book, I identified as a nontheist. In my second, having realized that many nontheists still held onto the idea of intervention, I identified as a theological non-realist which meant that I do not believe there is a god out there doing anything.[i] A decade into my ministry, however (and long before I wrote my first book on the subject or identified as an atheist), I realized that the idea of god that I held was invisible to others if I used the word "god" to talk about it. Everyone listening to me had a different concept of god, many of which got in the way of what I was trying to convey. My conception of god is one of relationship, represented in the United Church's most recent statement of faith by the term "Bond of Love": I do not believe in a being but I do believe in the enormous power of human community and the "god" created within meaning-making community. The “power of god” is the power created in human relationship, not something outside of it. I no longer use the term, however, for the simple reason that I want to be understood.
Humanists
There are those who use the term “atheist” to make it clear they do not believe in religious doctrine but hold a scientific view of the universe. “Humanist” is a term very closely aligned with “secularist,” but the two often differ. A secularist may hold religious beliefs but still argue that religion and state should remain separate - one of the fundamental definitions of secular. Additionally, the term humanist was often (if not originally) used to argue that humans are the most advanced of all life on the planet. Most humanists I know are humble folk who see humanity as part of the web of life, not as its crowning glory. Humanists may or may not use the term “atheist” to describe their beliefs.
Atheists
Atheists themselves, are divided on the meaning of term and use the words "strong" or "weak" to describe themselves. Many, even including Richard Dawkins, refuse the term "strong" atheist because it conveys that you "know" for a fact that there is no god. Dawkins even calls believers "weak atheists" because he argues that even very strong believers cannot possibly know if God exists. I'm pretty sure believers would argue he was wrong, but Dawkins would probably win since the burden of proof would be on the shoulders of the believers, and they wouldn’t be able to provide it. I'm a weak atheist; I do not see any proof for a god in our world[ii]. But, like Dawkins, I cannot identify as a strong atheist because I couldn't possibly know, as a matter of fact, that there is no god. The evidence against one, however, is pretty damning, I must say.
Emotional Definitions
All of the above are rational definitions of the term. The more common use of it is, I believe, emotional. For whatever reasons – fear, anger, arrogance – the term "atheist" is often used as a pejorative. Although my choice to identify as an atheist came long after I made it clear in my books that I did not believe in a supernatural god, or a being that could intervene in human affairs, people have reacted dramatically to the word. Even colleagues trained in theology have assumed what I mean and chosen to laden that assumption with negative stereotypes, primarily believing I am a religion-hater. They miss the more important facet of the work we do at West Hill, which is to take the core message of liberal Christianity – love one another – and deliver it without religious language for those who would embrace the work of loving one another but not the virgin birth, the Bible as God’s word, Jesus as Saviour, etc. By not using religious language, we welcome both believers who do not require it and everyone else, even those of other faiths. The emotional reaction to the word “atheist” has made many blind to the importance of our work.
I chose to describe myself as an atheist as an act of solidarity with those around the world who are dying for the right to freedom of expression. People continue to be assassinated by religious zealots in Bangladesh and imprisoned elsewhere simply for being humanist or identifying as atheist. The bigotry that was revealed in my own denomination by my use of the term reminds me that we must all be advocates for those who identify as atheists, and consistently work to bring the emotional response down to a more considered and rational one.
~ Rev. Gretta Vosper
Read and Share Online Here
About the Author
The Rev. Gretta Vosper is a United Church of Canada minister who is an atheist. Her best-selling books include With or Without God: Why The Way We Live is More Important Than What We Believe, and Amen: What Prayer Can Mean in a World Beyond Belief. She has also published three books of poetry and prayers.
[i] Philosophical non-realists argue that nothing exists; for example: I cannot prove my keyboard is beneath my hands; everything exists only in our minds. I am only a non-realist as far as gods go, so I call myself a theological non-theist: I do believe the keyboard is beneath my hands ... though I must admit, I have still not been able to answer the question, "If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there, does it make a sound?"[ii] If you come across a youtube video in which I say I am a strong atheist, that’s simply because I mixed up the terms! |
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Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited
Why Should People Pay Any Attention
to the Christian Church on Sexual Matters?
Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong
August 29, 2007
In recent decades the primary battles that have been fought in the Christian Church have not been about theology, but about issues of human sexuality. Huge debates polarize the Church on whether priesthood will be limited to males; the morality of birth control and abortion; who has the right to decide on what birth control will be legally available; whether celibacy for priests should be required, and the role and place of gay and lesbian people in the Church.
These debates have received front page treatment in newspapers across the world as the media, and presumably their audiences, continue to regard them as newsworthy. Those parts of the Christian Church that move ahead by ordaining women or qualified homosexual candidates into their ministry are portrayed as doing very controversial and extraordinary things. The attempt to excommunicate the ones who are initiating the change or to threaten the church’s fabric with schism is also regarded as newsworthy. The presumption behind this media coverage is that the Church is actually qualified to speak with competence on matters of sexuality. I challenge the correctness of that presumption.
>From where does this presumption come? Why do people think that the Church has sufficient expertise in matters of sexuality to warrant any attention? Is this not the same institution that has taught us that sex is both evil and dirty, and that ‘sexlessness’ is the higher calling into holiness? The Christian Church has actually defined marriage as a compromise with sin. Is a sexless world imaginable or even desirable?
This institution has so deeply attached guilt to sex that it has produced in Christian countries either a repression of healthy sexuality among the faithful or an irresponsible free love among the dismissive. Is either a healthy alternative? Throughout its history the Church has also systematically filled women with deep feelings of inadequacy by declaring that menstruation produces a state of uncleanness. No one today believes that attitude to be based on anything other than ignorance and prejudice. One unspoken, but always present, argument used to prevent women from being ordained in several churches is that menstruation makes women a potentially polluting presence in holy places. That is also why the choirs in the great European Cathedrals consisted only of men and boys.
This institution has even informed the world that the ideal woman is a “virgin mother.” Since it is impossible for anyone to be both a virgin and a mother, no woman could ever live up to the ideal. Thus in one stroke all women were made to feel morally compromised. With the ideal not possible, this Church then proceeded to offer women a consolation prize. They could be virgins who joined the nunneries (as the brides of Christ and clearly the higher calling) or they could be mothers. If they chose marriage and motherhood they were still taught that the only redeeming purpose for sex was procreation, so any birth control practice that inhibited or minimized the possibility of pregnancy was a mortal sin. That is where the prohibition against birth control had its origin. In an overpopulated world is not the absence of effective family planning itself immoral?
It was out of the Roman Church’s visceral negativity to birth control that it recently instructed its adherents in Africa that condoms were not even morally acceptable for use even inside marriage to protect a wife from becoming infected by her HIV positive husband. Is it not a sign of distorted values to place a religious rule ahead of a woman’s life? There is no end to this litany of ecclesiastical malpractice, that reveals both contradictory and incompetent behavior. This institution first limited its priesthood to unmarried men, and then refused to acknowledge the fact that vast numbers of homosexual males found in this celibate priesthood a place in which to hide. Attempts to deny the fact that “mandatory celibacy” created the largest closet in which gay men have found sanctuary in Western history are laughably naive. When a gay man, however, dares to be honest about his priestly identity, the Church reacts with ecclesiastical uproar.
Does anyone really believe that Gene Robinson, the Episcopal Bishop of New Hampshire is the first gay bishop in the Anglican Church? He is not even the only gay bishop currently serving in that Church! His distinction is that he is the first honest gay bishop. Indeed to illustrate the total duplicity present in church hierarchies, some of the fiercest critics of homosexuality in the Church today are closeted homosexual bishops! I can name them on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. They have occupied the highest positions of ecclesiastical power. Repressed and dishonest homosexuality is never healthy, but that has been what the Church has practiced for centuries and yet people, for reasons that defy rationality, continue to listen to church leaders for guidance on
sexual issues.
The sexual values of the church are so deeply confused that travesties occur frequently. When the rampant abuse of children by priests was revealed, the church responded by covering up the evidence, transferring the violators and promoting their protectors like Cardinal Law. In England recently a man who was the trainer of clergy for one of that nation’s largest Anglican dioceses was forced to resign his appointment as a bishop because he was honest about his sexual orientation. No one seemed upset about that, however, when he was the trainer of clergy. Is this not a mixed message totally lacking in credibility?
In the Roman Catholic Church, Pope Benedict XVI began his pontificate promising to remove homosexuals from the priesthood of his Church. When the fine print was read, however, he only wanted to prevent “activist” gay males from “entering” the priesthood. If he went beyond that, the shortage of priests in that church would become unbearable. Estimates are that fully half of their ordained clergy throughout history, including bishops, archbishops, cardinals and popes have been closeted gay men. I would not bet against the truth of that estimate.
To bolster these irrational stances on sexual behavior, Church leaders regularly use the Bible as their final authority. In doing so, they reveal an amazing ability to be quite selective, while appearing oblivious to centuries of biblical scholarship. They seem not to notice that the Bible has been quoted through the ages on the wrong side of every social change, including ending the “divine right of kings” while clothing sexism inside high sounding phrases like “sacred tradition.” The Bible has also been used to promote immoral wars like the Crusades and to undergird the tyranny of right wing dictatorships in the third world. The Bible has even been quoted to justify the corporal punishment of children, producing in the process scandalous examples of abuse in both church and church related schools. In the light of these things why there any surprise that the Bible’s credibility has become minimal?
With a record like that, why does anyone still listen to the public proclamations about sex emanating from the Christian Church? Why would any woman be willing to heed the “moral opinion” of an all-male ecclesiastical group that pontificates in the name of a God called “Father,” about what is moral for a woman to do with her own body? Women, who are precluded from the decision making ecclesiastical processes, are quite rightly refusing to be subjected to such uninformed ignorance.
With these sexual battles draining its energy in hopeless conflicts they are destined to lose, no one seems to notice how little attention the Church leaders pay to the Christ figure, who identified himself with the marginalized of his society, the lepers, the Samaritans and even the woman taken in the act of adultery. He broke the bands of religious prejudice against women by engaging the woman by the well in conversation, by encouraging Mary, the sister of Martha, to choose the role of a pupil for herself and by having female disciples who “followed him all the way from Galilee.” How was it then possible for Christianity, formed by the followers of this Jesus, to diminish throughout its long history and always in the name of God, the lives and the humanity of so many? I think of the Church’s traditional victims: the Jews, the “heretics,” the scientists who introduced us to a new understanding of the world and finally people of color, women and homosexual persons everywhere, and wonder what these ecclesiastical victims think when they hear church leaders say: “the Bible is the inerrant word of God.” The gospel of John quotes Jesus, I think correctly, as saying “I came that they might have life, abundantly.” One cannot give life and diminish people’s humanity at the same time. Yet in spite of that record many people still seem to think that institutional Christianity must be listened to in the debate about changing sexual patterns among human beings. In the light of this record, I wonder why.
I am a bishop in the Church. I am deeply devoted to the Christ who stands at the heart of the Christian story. I treasure the sacred scriptures of my faith tradition and study them daily. Nonetheless, I am repelled by so much that I see emanating from within institutional Christianity today. Everywhere I go I confront a spiritually hungry population, but one that is increasingly unwilling to listen to the religious claims of those who have done such evil to so many while claiming that they are speaking for Christ. Most people I meet think that their only options are to continue to be part of this kind of abusive tradition or to rid themselves of all religion. That is why atheism has become such a popular subject for books today. I think a better alternative is to call the Christian Church into a new reformation that will transform it from being a power-seeking institution designed to create religious conformists to one whose goal is to enhance our common humanity. That would be for the Church to walk in a vastly different direction.
~ John Shelby Spong |
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