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Steve Duin, evangelical: the Jesus cartoons

What can we make of Sunday morning's column by Steve Duin?  First, you have to understand that Duin is not only a journalist, a columnist, a book lover, an afficionado of "graphic novels" (comic books.)  He's also a Christian evangelical.

In a progressive sense, of course.  Like Jim Wallis of Sojourners.  But he is an  evangelical, meaning one who takes the Bible seriously, if not literally.  And that fact informs everything  he writes, from his columns to his book reviews to his blog.

In his latest column, Duin maintains that the appropriate reaction to the obscene cartoons of Jesus published in a student newspaper, The Insurgent, should be a Christian response --forgiveness:

• "As a Christian, I'm deeply offended by this obscene mockery of my Lord and Savior. So in response, I'm going to unleash my religion's most powerful weapon: I forgive them."

• "As a Christian, I am -- yawn -- very upset. Actually, He can defend Himself quite well. He asked that my defense of Him is to love my enemies and forgive others. And the secret is I can't do it, so He does it through me!"

Both are evangelical responses.  And both beg the question:  Why is forgiveness necessary? 

It's clear that The Insurgent's intent in publishing the cartoons was to ridicule the theological politics of the Christian right-wing --and prominent Biblical literalists like Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, James Dobson, who arguably pose a greater threat to the security of this country than any ragtag group of so-called Isamic "jihadists".  And the humor, although adolescent and crude,  has indeed provoked a discusssion. 

But why forgiveness?  Dan Brown's best-selling book, The Da Vinci Code, protrayed Jesus as sexual human being, married, a father.  In fact most people, including mainstream Christian theologians, argue that Jesus was a man, fully flesh and blood, and subject to temptation.  Only Gnostics, and Jerry Falwell, would argue differently. 

In the Hebrew Old Testament, it was considered blasphemy to even pronounce the name of God.  Today, blasphemers of the fundamentalist persuasion claim to talk to God, and then tell the rest of us what he thinks, what he wants, what he intends for mankind.  The danger lies in the application of such "divine wisdom" to politics:

"The present-day 'religion' has little to do with Christianity. It is all bloody politics. ... For those who doubt that consolidating power and controlling politics is far more important to the religious right than saving souls, Katherine Yurica reports in her The New Messiahs text that Pat Robertson announced publicly on his 700 Club at a time when the religious right was gaining dominance, 'We have enough votes to run the country -- and when the people say, "we’ve had enough," we’re going to take over the country.' "

That's theocracy.  That's the obscenity The Insurgent was attempting to expose. 
 

Religious lunacy invades the airwaves

First Terry Schiavo.  Then 24/7 coverage of the Pope's demise ("Popeapalooza" to some.)  And tonight, the topper, or the coup de grace, depending on point of view-- the first installment of a six part miniseries on NBC called Revelations.  So what's going on?  Has the entire country gone mad?

Perhaps.  But then again, the recent religious media mania may simply be the machinations of Karl Rove.  Or more simply yet, the quest of the electronic  media for higher ratings and higher profits.  But put that aside for now.  Let's talk theology.

Back on Jan. 16, 2003, in an early Joe's School post, I wrote that there "are Christians,and then there are real Christians", and that local "evangelist Luis Palau  thinks real Christians are the ones 'who take the Bible seriously', which means, I'm guessing, that they take the Bible literally.  Which means that most Methodists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Congregationalists, Catholics, and Lutherans are not real Christians."  As one raised Lutheran, I would argue that the exact opposite is true. 

But there's a schism even among the literalists.  Some literalists actually make up stuff that's not in the Bible, like the Rapture (never mentioned in scripture), and fantastic interpretations of the heavy symbolism found in the Book of Revelation, which they turn into "end times", or apocalyptic, prophecy. 

As a result we get seriously deranged "Biblicists" who write fantasies like the Left Behind series and make millions of dollars doing it.  And, to a large degree, we get George W. Bush, who owes his Presidency to such people.  Listen to what Left Behind authors Tim Lehaye and Jerry Jenkins say to Morley Safer in this "60 MInutes" interview:

" 'There’s a good reason for that. I think if Jerry and I were cut, we’d both bleed red, white and blue,' says LaHaye. 'We believe that God has raised up America to be a tool in these last days, to get the Gospel to the innermost parts of the Earth' .” 

Jenkins and LeHaye are co-founders of the Moral Majority with Jerry Falwell, another preacher with enormous political clout.

Real Biblical scholars and theologians, like Barbara Rossing, dismiss the whole notion of the Rapture and the use of the Book of Revelation to predict a coming Armageddon.
Rossing wrote a book called The Rapture Exposed debunking the whole thing.

In an interview, she claims the notion of Rapture dates back only to the nineteenth century:

"JWW: You write in your book that the rapture idea is only 170 yearsold. Most people don’t realize this. They probably believe this is what the Apostle Paul preached. Supposedly in Scotland in 1830, a 15-year-old girl named Margaret MacDonald had a vision about the rapture. It was later amplified by a man named John Nelson Darby. Darby spread the rapture idea. Can you expand on this?
       
BR: I don’t know how seriously to take the Margaret MacDonald story.
       
JWW:  Are you saying that Darby was not telling the truth?
       
BR: I think Darby genuinely believed what he was saying about the rapture.  But he did invent the notion of the two-stage return of Christ; that is,  a rapture of believers and then a return as a sort of warrior king. The Apostle Paul never taught this. No other biblical figure did, either. Prior to Darby, there was no one teaching a line between the so-called rapture and the so-called 7-year period of tribulation, with a second      coming of Christ. This was all new, and it began in the 1830s.
       
JWW: The rapture is only 170 years old? Thus, you are saying that the rapture, the Left Behind books and the Hal Lindsey books are something the traditional churches didn’t believe until 1830.
       
BR: Right. The traditional church certainly believed in Jesus’ second coming and in the resurrection. However, they did not believe in a two-stage second coming."

She says further that to characterize Jesus as violent and vengeful is a distortion of the worst sort:

"We counter it with lamb power. Jesus is the lamb in the book of Revelation who teaches a different way than more and more firepower and violence.  It’s the power of love to change the world. This philosophy will not make it as an exciting book or movie."

I don't know about that.  I think I'd rather watch that story than news footage of the carnage in Iraq.  Or the struggles in Israel, which are apparently setting the stage for the mother of all battles, the Battle of Armageddon.

The nexus of politics and religious lunacy

Speaking of fundamentalism, Bill Moyers has a piece in The New York Review of Books (based on a lecture that I linked in an earlier post) --"Welcome to Doomsday"-- that takes a critical look at the Book of Revelation and the "fantastical theology" that arises from it.

"There are millions of Christians who believe the Bible is literally true, word for word. Some of them—we'll come back to the question of how many— subscribe to a fantastical theology concocted in the nineteenth century by two immigrant preachers who took disparate passages from the Bible and wove them with their own hallucinations into a narrative foretelling the return of Jesus and the end of the world."

Moyers is referring to the "Rapture", which has captured the imagination (and the sanity) of millions of Americans, and made crackpot right-wing "theologian" Tim LaHaye, a best selling author with his "Left Behind" series, fictional accounts of what happens to those who are not whisked, naked, to Heaven on the last day.

Of course, there is no Biblical basis for such a belief, even for literalists:

"The plot of the Rapture—the word never appears in the Bible although some fantasists insist it is the hidden code to the Book of Revelation—is rather simple, if bizarre."

What does the Rapture have to do with politics?  As George Monbiot pointed out in this biting analysis, all one has to do is look at American foreign policy emanating from George Bush's White House.  And remember that Bush relies heavily on the religious nutcases who make up his political base:

"What makes the story so appealing to Christian fundamentalists is that before the big battle begins, all 'true believers' (ie those who believe what THEY believe) will be lifted out of their clothes and wafted up to heaven during an event called the Rapture. Not only do the worthy get to sit at the right hand of God, but they will be able to watch, from the best seats, their political and religious opponents being devoured by boils, sores, locusts and frogs, during the seven years of Tribulation which follow.

"The true believers are now seeking to bring all this about. This means staging confrontations at the old temple site (in 2000 three US Christians were deported for trying to blow up the mosques there), sponsoring Jewish settlements in the occupied territories, demanding ever more US support for Israel, and seeking to provoke a final battle with the Muslim world/Axis of Evil/United Nations/European Union/France or whoever the legions of the Antichrist turn out to be."

Moyers continues the narrative:

"For them the invasion of Iraq was a warm-up act, predicted in the Book of Revelation, where four angels 'bound in the great river Euphrates' will be released 'to slay the third part of man.' A war with Islam in the Middle East is not something to be feared but welcomed—an essential conflagration on the road to redemption."

And that's only foreign policy:

"What does this mean for public policy and the environment? Listen to John Hagee, pastor of the 17,000- member Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, who is quoted in Rossing's book as saying: 'Mark it down, take it to heart, and comfort one another with these words. Doomsday is coming for the earth, for the nations, and for individuals, but those who have trusted in Jesus will not be present on earth to witness the dire time of tribulation.' Rossing sums up the message in five words that she says are basic Rapture credo: 'The world cannot be saved.' It leads to 'appalling ethics,' she reasons, because the faithful are relieved of concern for the environment, violence, and everything else except their personal salvation. The earth suffers the same fate as the unsaved. All are destroyed."

The Rossing Moyers refers to is Barbara Rossing, an ordained Lutheran minister and author of the book, The Rapture Exposed.  Click here for an interview with Rossing, in which she claims that the Rapture was invented 170 years ago.
 

Religion and values

This letter to the editor from a week ago continues to pique my interest:

Morality doesn't require faith

"I've noticed that many creationists, including some of those interviewed for your article, 'Shepherding their arguments' (Feb. 24), seem to be advocating creationism because they think that a belief in God is necessary for people to behave morally.

"Comments such as, 'We have kids killing kids because they think they're just a bunch of people descended from monkeys, with no one to answer to,' imply that the need for a higher authority is more important than science or the search for the truth.

"What these people are missing is that some of the most benevolent, selfless, moral people in history were neither Christian nor believers of creationism. You don't have to believe God created the world in seven days or even believe in heaven and hell to be a moral person.

"Morality existed in Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism and in secular societies such as the ancient Greek civilization long before Jesus was born."

Creationists are, as I wrote yesterday, Biblical literalists.  I'm not particularly interested in what they have to say.  I am interested, however, in the underlying premise of the letter, which is:  You don't have to believe in God to behave morally.

My response to that is-- it depends on what you mean by "God."

Religious fundamentalists speak of God as a person, usually a male person, and they endow this God with the worst of all human characteristics- hate, anger, intolerance, jealousy, vengefulness, violence, even a sort of narrow-mindedness. In so doing they make themselves easy targets for skeptics, agnostics, secularists, scientific rationalists and all critics of "religion", most notably Christopher Hitchens and certain members of my own family.  But not all proponents of the religious life are stupid.  Some in fact are quite intelligent and accomplished, and perhaps only slightly irrational in their embrace of the transcendent, or "supernatural'. By irrational I mean only that  religious truth may be less accessible to the mind than the heart, figuratively speaking.  Once the "leap of faith" has occurred, reasoned discourse follows, as is evident in the writing of theologians and religious philosophers.

Take C.S. Lewis, for example, a noted scholar, writer, lecturer, and Christian apologist.
He argues that reasoned discourse--logic-- has to begin someplace.  It must proceed from a premise, an assumption of what's real, true, right (or wrong).  It's like reading a map or a set of directions for gettiing from ponit A to point B (my analogy, not Lewis'.)  A map (or directions) that starts in the wrong place will always lead us to the wrong place, no matter how smart we are.  That's why Martin Luther said, "Reason is a whore", a tool of the mind that can be used in the service of the good or the bad, the true or the false.   

That's the point of a remarkable little book by Lewis, The Abolition of Man, in which Lewis argues that all values, all morality, derive from some transcendent source, which for the purposes of the book, he labels the "Tao": 

"The Chinese also speak of a great thing (the greatest thing) called the Tao. It is the reality beyond all predicates, the abyss that was before the Creator Himself. It is Nature, it is the Way, the Road. It is the Way in which the universe goes on, the Way in which things everlastingly emerge, stilly and tranquilly, into space and time. It is also the Way which every man should tread in imitation of that cosmic and supercosmic progression, conforming all activities to that great exemplar. 'In ritual', say the Analects, 'it is harmony with Nature that is prized.' The ancient Jews likewise praise the Law as being 'true'."

"This conception in all its forms, Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic, Christian, and Oriental alike, I shall henceforth refer to for brevity simply as 'the Tao'. Some of the accounts of it which I have quoted will seem, perhaps, to many of you merely quaint or even magical. But what is common to them all is something we cannot neglect. It is the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are. Those who know the Tao can hold that to call children delightful or old men venerable is not simply to record a psychological fact about our own parental or filial emotions at the moment, but to recognize a quality which demands a certain response from us whether we make it or not. I myself do not enjoy the society of small children: because I speak from within the Tao I recognize this as a defect in myself—just as a man may have to recognize that he is tone deaf or colour blind."

Lewis constructs a mind-chest-belly metaphor to describe man, wherein the mind controls the belly (appetites) through the mediation of the chest (the seat of emotion or "magnanimity"):

"We were told it all long ago by Plato. As the king governs by his executive, so Reason in man must rule the mere appetites by means of the 'spirited element'. The head rules the belly through the chest—the seat, as Alanus tells us, of Magnanimity, of emotions organized by trained habit into stable sentiments. The Chest-Magnanimity-Sentiment—these are the indispensable liaison officers between cerebral man and visceral man. It may even be said that it is by this middle element that man is man: for by his intellect he is mere spirit and by his appetite mere animal."

Indeed, the first part of the book is entitled "Men Without Chests".

It's unfortunate that Lewis' argument has been co-opted and twisted by religious zealots into a condemnation of what they call "moral relativism", a code word for any beliefs that spring from compassion, empathy, a desire for justice, or just about anything espoused by people who aren't followers of Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, James Dobson, or any of their growing number of clones.

Click here for a concise summary of The Abolition of Man, described by the author as "... a Republic for our day. Like Plato, Lewis argues that to live rightly is much better than to live wrongly."

Back to the question of God.  It's better left as just that-- a question.  It's both silly and stupid to attempt any discussion of the nature of God, or what it means to "believe in God."  Early Jews, the first monotheists, were forbidden to even mention the name.

I agree with Karen Armstrong:  lets stick with developing a greater capacity for compassion and empathy, and leave it at that.

George and Jesus

Two recent posts by Chuck Currie bring to mind George Monbiot's withering and wickedly funny column on the coming Armageddon and the accompanying "Rapture"which I first mentioned in Joe's School a couple of months ago (April 22). But it's worth revisiting.

Currie first posts a column by Portland's own Nicholas Kristoff in the New York Times about the fundamentalist Christian Left Behind book series. Kristoff claims he was reluctant to take on the religious beliefs, sincerely held, of others, but he concluded ultimately "it's a mistake to treat religion as a taboo... ." (Kristoff, remember, disapproves of calling Bush a liar.)
For those not familiar with the Left Behind books, the column is enlightening, and disturbing:

"These are the best-selling novels for adults in the United States, and they have sold more than 60 million copies worldwide. The latest is "Glorious Appearing," which has Jesus returning to Earth to wipe all non-Christians from the planet. It's disconcerting to find ethnic cleansing celebrated as the height of piety."

Speaking of piety, Currie's second post
has our President proclaiming to a group of Amish,

“I trust God speaks through me. Without that, I couldn’t do my job.’’

Theocracy, anyone?