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Biblical Billionaires and the Taming of Jesus
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| Essay by Dr. Carl Krieg
June 25, 2020
My initial intent in writing this column was to look at how the early church lost the message of Jesus, but the recent protests, climate change, and the pandemic seemed more urgent, demanding immediate attention. Then I realized that lurking behind all of them was the dark but pervasive shadow of society’s rich and powerful, those who expand and protect their interests at any cost. Racial discrimination today is a continuation of the slavery that formed the foundation of our economy. With respect to climate change, the case certainly can be made that a half century ago fossil fuel industries were well aware of the danger of global warming but chose for profit’s sake to dig and drill anyway. It would be difficult to argue that greedy humans created the coronavirus, but the rich and powerful certainly are taking advantage of the crisis. While comforting the public with the lie that all was well, US senators with insider information were dumping stocks that would tumble with the pandemic and investing in stocks that would rise. When congress created a fund to enable the economy to survive, giant banks received a huge subsidy and are using that money to buy up fracking companies going bankrupt because of the virus. Three massive tragedies, all inter-related because of the power of wealth.
What has always been less obvious, however, is the impact of the rich and powerful on the development of the early church.The time of Jesus was a time when these people were utilizing all means at their disposal to become even more rich and more powerful. The government was in on it. Business was in on it. The religious establishment was in on it. The poor were crushed.
Into this scene at about age 28, came Jesus from a small village called Nazareth in the province of Galilee. He and his disciples lived and taught a life that denounced the oppression that dominated society, offering instead the vision of a community based on caring and sharing. But it didn’t last.
The timeline is instructive. From a historical point of view, the religious community described in the New Testament developed in four stages. The first was that created by Jesus himself. We often think of this community as limited to twelve male apostles, but there were women as well. We have the names of six, mention of “the others”, and we are told that they supported and provided for Jesus and his followers. The whole group was based in Capernaum from whence they traveled into the Galilean countryside. We must, therefore, imagine about 25 men and women who were gathered by Jesus and who lived together. The fullness of humanity incarnate in Jesus and the power and mystique of his person and his teaching impacted them as nothing they had ever experienced before. Through him they had found a new life together, and they wanted to share this good news with others. And then he was crucified.
Initially, so the story goes, they were terrified, denying that they ever knew the man, lest they too be implicated in the crime of sedition against the Roman Empire. After that initial bout of terror a new experience enveloped them, and so begins the second stage of the communal development. They remembered Jesus and all he had done and said, and came to believe that he was present again in their midst in a new form, the form of spirit. As historians of the 21st century we can say with certainty that the disciples believed that the holy spirit of Jesus infused their community, reinstating the fullness and joy they had experienced in their life together before he was killed, and again inspiring them to share with others what they now experienced.
They shared, they grew in number, and so begins stage three in their development. Let us assume that Jesus was crucified in the year 30 ce, and that Paul was converted to this new faith in 35. When Paul writes his first letter in 45, we discover that there are already in existence many small congregations that have emerged and, further, that there are groups within these churches that don’t agree with one another. A lot has happened since the crucifixion. The church has grown, and controversy has arisen about many matters. Who was Jesus? What did he do for us? How do we know? Who were there as eyewitnesses? Are men and women equal? Do we have to free our slaves? Must I share my property with the less fortunate? How are we to relate Jew and Gentile?
Paul had much to say on these matters, partially but forcefully summed up in his words to the church in Galatia: “In Christ there is neither Jew nor Gentile, male nor female, slave nor free.” Unfortunately, his word did not carry the day, and so we enter stage four, epitomized in the first letter of Timothy, found in the New Testament and written toward the end of the first century. Here we are bluntly warned, among other matters, that women are subject to men, that we must be subject to the governing authorities, slaves must obey their masters, and priests and bishops rule the church. This attitude is also found in other New Testament writing dating from this period.
The first question that comes to mind is: why? why did the history unfold as it did? How did we get from a ragtag group of happy, fulfilled and excited men and women, to an institution that turned its back on every change Jesus tried to initiate, basically reverting to the existing patriarchy/patronage system that pervaded the culture?
A simple answer suggests itself. What Jesus both incarnated and taught was an alternative to the system that benefited the rich and powerful, be they in government, business or religion. And, to put it bluntly, they did not like that. The crucifixion is proof. They had to get rid of him, but that didn’t succeed as they hoped, inasmuch as the movement spread. The ultimate takeover of the movement by conservative forces, however, did succeed, although it took a long time.
Questions arise. Was there an intentional plot by them to take over the church? Did the influences that changed the church arise from within the church itself? Or was it the inertia of society that squashed the revolutionary impetus? Whatever the answer to these questions, the fact remains that by the end of the first century, Jesus and the disciples had lost and culture had won. As a consequence, much of what we accept as basic Christian understanding did not originate with Jesus and the disciples, but rather with the interests of the rich and powerful. Women be quiet and submit to your husbands. Slaves obey your masters. Everyone be subject to the governing authorities. The priests rule the church. That much is basic to the established order of oppression.
But there is more. Less obvious but equally destructive was a total shift in the meaning of Jesus’ life, death and new life. The disciples found in Jesus a model of the person they too could become, and he was a person who preached justice and equality, love and kindness toward one another. To the authorities such people are suspect, and that, no doubt, is why Pilate had him crucified. But as time went on, the perceived role of Jesus shifted away from the revolutionary to the sacrificial. His death became a propitiation of an angry god, a socially much less dangerous role. Jesus, the one who had wanted to create a just and loving society, a kingdom of God on earth, became the one who had died for your sins, a role much more amenable to the existing culture. Sacrificial lambs do not threaten class and wealth stratification. Prophets do.
The same analysis holds for the resurrection of Jesus. The disciples fully believed that the revolutionary who had gathered them into a microcosm of the kingdom was now alive in their midst as spirit. Really alive, inspiring them to continue growing the kingdom. To them, the resurrection demonstrated that the power of evil evident in the crucifixion, the power of Rome, had been overcome by the power of God. Love ruled the universe, not death and destruction. Such conviction was dangerous for the existing order, challenging, as it did, the authenticity of violence as the norm of human life together. The solution for the established order was to transform the resurrection as revolutionary into the resurrection as resuscitation, and by accepting and promulgating this maneuver, the church lost its prophetic vitality and became the promoter of accepted and acceptable cultural norms. The empty tomb may have started as a pointer to the victory over cosmic evil, but it soon became identified as the thing itself.
As a result of these changes in the supposed role of Jesus, the meaning of his life, death and resurrection was shifted from the present to the future. Instead of the One who gave his life in the struggle to transform society, he became the one who would judge every individual at some future, undetermined time. God in the moment became God at the end of time, a god much more palatable to the existing order.
As a consequence, faith, which at first meant participation in the Way of the kingdom, a way of social justice and equality, now degenerated into acceptance of certain doctrines of belief, chief among them being that Jesus had died for your sins. Such faith posed little threat to the establishment.
The takeover was complete, encapsulated as it was in the holy writ of the Christian scripture, now defined and interpreted by the bishops and priests.
I am neither a biblical scholar nor a historian of the first century, but I am greatly disturbed that the message of Jesus was transmogrified into a bastion of reactionary ideology and that that ideology has become identified today with the gospel of Jesus. The hidden influence of the rich and powerful is more pervasive than we’d like to believe.
~ Carl Krieg
Read online here
About the Author
Dr. Carl Krieg received his BA from Dartmouth College, MDiv from Union Theological Seminary in NYC, and PhD from the University of Chicago Divinity School. He is the author of What to Believe? the Questions of Christian Faith, and The Void and the Vision. 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 A Reader
The only religion I was exposed to as a child was Pentecostal. I never subscribed to it, tried several denominations, never felt any connection. The hell and damnation thing is so deeply rooted in me that it makes me afraid to speak my real mind about God. The older I have gotten, I am 64, the more alone and abandoned I feel. Is there a God? If there is, how can I worship authentically? What books can I read to help me resolve this spiritual crisis in my heart? I desperately want a connection to a higher power and I would love to share that in a group of people but I just cannot abide the Christian faith. I respect it but I cannot go, sit, and pretend that I believe it all. It’s just too hypocritical. Can you offer guidance?
A: By Jennifer Berit
Dear Reader,
This is a very exciting moment in your life. It is never too late to begin or to continue on your unique authentic spiritual path. I am not surprised to hear of your skepticism with the Christian faith because our traditional religions have long subscribed to a paradigm that is no longer relevant to our times - a paradigm that used religion to make sense of mysteries of the universe we could not explain, a paradigm that told us to focus not on this earthly reality and our present life but instead to always look toward transcendence and live our life according to what will get us into a mythical heaven.
To step away from a dogma or faith tradition that does not resonate with you is one of the bravest and most important things you can do. I could recommend hundreds of books that might spark a new spirituality within you - anything by Bishop John Shelby Spong, Matthew Fox, Joanna Macy, Yeye Luisah Teish, Bill Plotkin, Robin Wall Kimmerer, poetry by Maya Angelou, David Whyte, Mary Oliver, Walt Whitman, and the list goes on and on. But what I recommend before reading any books or following any teachers is to find yourself, in nature. Develop a practice of finding a spot where you can connect with nature - a creek, a tree, a house plant, and meditate. I trust that eventually you will find God in every wild creature this planet has to offer, from the littlest ant to the highest mountain. The limitless divine energy that imbues our sacred Earth, our only home, is one that we can always trust.
~ Jennifer Berit
Read and share online here
About the Author
Jennifer Berit is the co-author of Order of the Sacred Earth: An Intergenerational Vision of Love and Action and works in book publishing as a private consultant for authors assisting with manuscript editing and book publicity. She is also the co-director of Wild Awakenings, an adult Rites of Passage organization dedicated to fostering the thriving of Earth, life, and humanity. Jennifer was on the Board of Trustees at the Unity in Marin Spiritual Community for three years, serving as the Board President for 18 months. Also at Unity in Marin, Jennifer was a guest speaker for Sunday mornings, she led Rites of Passage groups for teenagers, and founded a young adult interfaith group committed to conscious connection, community service, and social activism. She is a passionate hiker, reader, writer, and public speaker.
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Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited
The Study of Life, Part 5: Galapagos II - My Search for
the Meaning of Life as I Walked in Darwin's Footsteps
Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong
August 27, 2009
In the preparation required to write my new book on eternal life, I soon discovered that this subject raised all of the contemporary theological issues that threaten to destroy Christianity as we have known it. It was clear that I would have to turn the traditional religious approach around. I had to read the modern critics for whom the religious concepts of the past make no sense. I also had to come to a new understanding of what life itself means. Life after death cannot possibly be contemplated until one understands the wondrous and even mysterious dimensions of life before death. That study resulted in two immediate insights. First, I discovered the drive to survive deep in every specimen of life from the rainforests to human beings. Second, I found all life to be deeply interrelated and even linked through DNA. Armed with this information I now faced the fact that the work of Charles Darwin had rendered the basic tenets of traditional religion so suspect that if I were to speak of life after death with any credibility I would have to find a new starting place, perhaps outside of or beyond religion itself. I could no longer employ any concept of God that had reigned in religious circles since the birth of religion. Since most people’s idea of God is that of an external supernatural being ruling over the world, they would inevitably see the path I would be walking as a move into atheism, something about 180 degrees different from what I was in fact trying to communicate. I would also have to dismiss any concept of life after death based on the behavior controls of eternal reward and punishment, and that is the primary content of most religious ideas of life after death.
As I embraced these conclusions, I also understood just why Darwinism and traditional religion were such mortal enemies. If Darwin was right, religion in general, and Christianity in particular, was wrong on almost every level. In this column I want to look briefly at the content of that struggle. To move beyond it I must understand it.
The first flash point in the conflict between Darwin and Christianity was centered on the authority of scripture. Evolution did not jibe in any detail with the biblical story of creation. The timeline in the Bible was quite different from the timeline that Darwin was utilizing. This was so even though Darwin was not yet aware of the actual age of the Earth at 4.7 billion years or the age of life at 3.8 billion years. Second, the Bible attributed the varieties of species to the divine initiative; Darwin to natural selection. Third, the Bible saw human life as a special creation, not related to anything else, while Darwin saw it as evolving out of other forms of life.
The scripture part of the debate was not as strong in intellectual Christian circles as the traditionalists thought, because a critical study of the Bible had been initiated inside the Church, primarily in Germany, some 50 years prior to Darwin’ writings. In 1835, David Friedrich Strauss had published his monumental work, Leben Jesu, which had been translated into English in 1846 under the title The Life of Jesus Critically Examined by George Eliot, the author of Silas Marner and the pen name of Mary Ann Evans. For traditional Christians, Strauss’ work was a deeply disturbing book, since it revealed not only the contradictions in the gospel tradition but the very human way in which the gospels had been written. It was clear to Strauss and his colleagues that no angel had guided Matthew’s hand in writing his gospel, as the popular art of the day portrayed. Matthew had rather copied about 90% of Mark into his text. In the process he had added to, deleted from and even changed some of Mark’s ideas. In the non-academic ranks, however, the Bible-based condemnation of Darwin had much longer to run, even after someone suggested that each day in the Genesis creation story “might have been a billion years.”
By 1910, a group of Presbyterian divines centered around Princeton Theological Seminary in New Jersey decided to mount a counterattack against Darwin in the name of defending “traditional Bible-based Christianity.” A series of pamphlets, about 500,000 per printing, were published on a regular basis over a five-year period and distributed to Christian leaders around the world. The pamphlets, financed by the Union Oil Company of California (UNOCAL) in the first known instance of an alliance between the oil industry and right-wing religion, were called “The Fundamentals” and through them, the words “fundamentalist” and “fundamentalism” entered our vocabulary. As a direct result of these pamphlets, all of America’s mainline churches began to show a split between their fundamentalist members and those who came to be called “modernists.” While the pamphlets polarized the churches, they did little to push back the Darwinian tide.
The next public battlefield between Darwin and traditional religion took place in the unlikely spot of Clayton, Tennessee, in the year 1925, when a young science teacher named John Scopes was recruited by the American Civil Liberties Union to challenge openly a state law in Tennessee forbidding the teaching of anything in the public schools of Tennessee that was contrary to “the word of God found in the Holy Scriptures.” That trial captured the attention of the nation since it was covered by every major newspaper in America, to say nothing of the fledgling and still somewhat static-filled radio industry. John Scopes was found guilty and fined $100. The fine was never paid. The effect of the trial, however, was once again to bring the insights of Charles Darwin into the awareness of the general public in a massive way. It also served to begin the split in this nation on social issues that was destined to pit the urban Northeast and West coast of America against the heartland of the South and the Midwest, the precursor of the blue states versus the red states of the George W. Bush era. Truth, however, is never really stopped because it is threatening or inconvenient to a previous way of thinking.
Next, from embattled religious leaders came the “Creation Science Movement,” reaching its high-water mark in 1970 when it bought pressure on Washington’s Smithsonian Institution to close an exhibition on “The Dynamics of Evolution.” Failing that, they wanted a countering exhibition on creation science to be presented so that “truth could be balanced.” That too failed, and ultimately the Supreme Court dismissed creation science as unconstitutional under the separation of church and state provision of the constitution. Still not willing to accept defeat, critics of evolution repackaged creation science under the new banner of “Intelligent Design,” only to have that ploy also dismissed by the courts. Darwinism was clearly here to stay.
With the literal Bible no longer at the heart of the conflict, it slowly began to dawn on the wider Christian consciousness that a much deeper threat to traditional religion had now been loosed upon them. If Darwin was correct then the basic Christian myth had made assumptions that were no longer true. There was no “perfect creation” from which human life could fall into original sin. If there had been no fall, there was no need for a divine rescue operation carried out by Jesus on the cross. Salvation could no longer mean being restored to a status that human life had never possessed. Instead of being “fallen sinners” we were incomplete human beings. We did not need to be redeemed, we needed to be called and empowered to become more deeply and fully human. Pioneering Christian theologians began to wrestle with these ideas, but whenever these ideas achieved public notice the status quo ecclesiastical authorities attacked them vigorously. In the early years of the 20th century thinkers like Alfred North Whitehead sought to redefine God more as “a process than as a being.” A Roman Catholic priest, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, became the first religious figure to seek to reconcile God and evolution in his book The Phenomenon of Man. The Vatican responded by indexing his works. Reformed theologian Paul Tillich, writing in the 1940’s and 1950’s, built on these ideas by suggesting that there was a “God beyond the Gods of men and women” and he began to refer to God not as “a being” but as “the Ground of Being.” Next came the “God is Dead” theologians in the 1960’s as the supernatural, theistic concept of God became less and less believable. They were followed by the work of two Anglican bishops, John A. T. Robinson in Great Britain and James A. Pike in America. For their efforts both were marginalized and finally squeezed out by their respective churches. The external, supernatural and invasive God, however, was seen to be in inevitable collapse.
We live today in the midst of this transition. Those who cannot see the problem and who seem to think that all one has to do is to recite the old formulas loudly and they will be believable have become the fundamentalists. They come in both a Catholic and a Protestant form. Those who do see the problem are now convinced that religion is dying or has already died. They become the secularists who get on with the task of living creatively in a godless world. Most of them have been drawn from the “main line” churches, which are all in a statistical freefall.
Darwin removed God from the day-to-day workings of our world. He redefined human life biologically as one species of the animal kingdom, finite creatures destined for a fate no different from the sheep of New Zealand or the iguanas of the Galapagos. If that proved to be an accurate definition then traditional religion with its theistic concept of God could not survive. No artificial respiration will resuscitate a concept that is not in touch with established knowledge. Either we have reached the end of religion as a human enterprise or we have to find a new way to approach both human life and whatever we mean by transcendence. A record-keeping theistic deity, who metes out reward and punishment in order to control behavior, is simply no longer viable. This is not an insignificant crisis. No, I am not prepared to reject Christianity, but I am prepared to rethink its meaning in a radical way, so radical that traditional Christians may feel that all that they once believed was holy is now being taken away from them.
To analyze the possibilities for a new Christianity designed to live without apology in this new world will be my task in the column next week.
~ John Shelby Spong
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Announcements
Wild Christ, Wild Earth, Wild Self:
Weekend Intensive
Mirabai Starr joins Seminary of the Wild guides on June 25th in an online webinar. This weekend online intensive includes the webinar and a nature-based introduction to Seminary of the Wild.
The week is primarily experiential, with daily invitations to solo wanders wherever you reside. This journey will rewild your mind and body and allow you to move more deeply into your heart as you listen for the voice of the Holy speaking your name. READ ON ...
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