How I became a Humanist #10: How to Read and Understand the Bible #2

Before studying theology, I think I read the Bible the way most Christians do.  If I read a section about Jesus healing a leper, I thought of it as history.  If I read a story about Jesus' geneology, I read it as history.  I looked at most the Bible as a sort of text book with stories that were more or less chronologically related.  It didn't occur to me that instead the stories might be theologically related, which is why the stories don't always occur in the same order in the various Gospels.  It's also why the genealogy of Jesus in Matthew differs from the one in Luke.  The two authors are making different points.  (I'll explain the difference between the theological difference between the genealogies if someone asks.)

Jesus Heals the Leper

One of the most common ways to see theology at play in the Bible is to observe how stories are placed alongside one another, that is, how they contrast and compare with one another (You don't need to know Greek to do this).  I'll use two examples.  Let's first start with the Gospel of Mark 1:40 - 3:6.  If you want to get the most out of this, read the text before continuing (If you can, read from a text that has no subtitles.)

Notice the following themes in several of the stories.

• Faith: 
• The leper demonstrates faith by saying, "if you will, you can make me clean."
• The friends of the paralytic man demonstrate faith by going out of their way to get to Jesus
• Mercy
• Jesus touches the leper before he heals him (this is technically against the law).  The man probably hasn't been touched by a clean person for years.  Jesus dignifies his humanity before he heals his body.
• Jesus forgives the sins of the paralytic man before healing him (again, treating the soul).
• Jesus recruits a tax collector (who worked for the Romans - they were hated as traitors).  Jesus recognizes the outcast (same with the paralytic and the leper).
• Jesus chills with tax collectors and sinners.  He's ridiculed for this - these people haven't straightened out their lives yet.  They're not the picture of charity work that you would put on a poster.  They're sinners.  He dignifies their humanity before they get it right.  He spends time with them before he heals them. 
• Jesus heals on the Sabbath.  Again, he's breaking the law, kind of.  What he's saying is "this person's humanity is more important than protecting our most sacred laws, even the Sabbath."

Jesus Heals the Paralytic (By Jan Luyken)

• Jesus Power
  If you go back even further in the text to 1:21 you see a theme of Jesus' power permeate each story.
• Jesus has power over demons
• He has power over illness
• He has power to forgive
• He has power over the Sabbath
• He even has authority to interpret scripture that the scribes don't.

When we split the Bible up into memory verses and subsections with neat little headlines, we can miss these themes.  We also miss them because we haven't been taught to look for them.  The stories tie together and are generally told alongside one another to bring about a variety of nuanced theological points.

On account of the lengthy section of scripture, I'll continue this topic next week.

How I Became a Humanist #9: Understanding the Bible and How to Use It #1

I was brought up to believe that Christians have a duty to read the Bible.  From age 8, I read it regularly.  The funny thing is, no one ever told me how to read the Bible.  In church, we sometimes went through books, but often we had lessons in which the teacher would bounce around the Bible from verse to verse.  In my preteen years, when I was taught how to preach, I was given a concordance and told that I could look up topics and words to support what I had to say.  This way of reading the Bible is common in churches that grew up on American soil during the 1800s and afterward.

One of the first serious Bible classes I took in undergrad was a course in how to read the Bible.  In it, we learned a lot of things that changed the way I saw scripture and how Christians ought to use it.

One of the first things I learned was the Bible was not originally written with chapters and verses.  Admittedly, I already knew this, but I'd never taken the time to think about what it meant.  I'd also never taken the time to consider the fact that most of the Bibles we read don't just have those additions, they also have labeled subheadings.  Sometimes the subheadings explain the meaning of the scripture.  Even when they don't, they separate one story from another in a way that the author of the text might not have intended.

Matthew Chatper 5 - 6 NIV (Notice the Subtitles)

It will surprise some readers to know that chapters were not commonplace in the Bible until the 900s (though versions with chapters showed up in the 4th century), and that verses didn't become commonplace around the 1500s, which is why there are a few places in the Bible where Catholics and Protestants separate verses differently (the process hadn't completed when the Reformation started). (More Information)

Obviously, concordances like the ones we use today couldn't exist without verses.  The Bible wasn't written to be used in the way that Evangelicals use it - topically.  It was written book by book, and the books were meant to be read as wholes.  Imagine for a moment that a friend of yours is trying to convince you of something I want to say to you, but instead of giving you several paragraphs from me, he takes a sentence from my writing here, a sentence there and combines them to support his intended message.  Can you be sure that I would agree with his message?  Taking time to think about how the Bible was written and originally delivered to us forced me to think about how to read it well and to not force it to say whatever I might want it to.

One of the other things I learned, probably in a history class, is that the printing press didn't exist in a form useful to the masses before the mid 1400s.  In order to copy books, you needed a scribe to write down every single letter of every single word.  Imagine how long it would take to write a copy of the whole Bible - and that would be just one copy.  If you wanted another copy, the scribe would have to repeat the entire process.  Books were really expensive.  A copy of the Bible could cost more than the average person would make in his entire life.

Early Christians didn't own copies of the Bible.  In fact, since books were inaccessible to most people, the average person had no reason to learn how to read.  And so, he didn't.  Instead, just like there were scribes to make copies of books, there were professional readers who would read texts to audiences.  This is why Mark 13:14 says, "Let the reader understand."  Mark wants to make sure that the reader, obviously not you or I, understands.  For the first 1500 years of Christianity, the Bible was inaccessible to the average Christian not simply because of persecution from the Catholic Church, but because a single book was too expensive to buy and the average person couldn't read anyway.

The people who taught this to me rarely questioned what this meant for the Churches of Christ and other Evangelical Churches, but I did.  It occurred to me that if our churches couldn't have even existed in their current form with their current assumptions for the first 75% of Christian history, then we must have some false assumptions about what is required to be Christian.  Clearly, reading the Bible regularly isn't something God expected of the average Christian, otherwise he would have waited to send Jesus until the 1500s, or somehow inspired society with an efficient printing press much earlier.  God saw no need to intervene.

The Bible was originally handwritten.  This is a cleaned up version of Koine Greek.  The earliest versions didn't have dots or spaces between the words, which sometimes created confusion for copying or translating scribes.

I knew this was a problem for the Churches of Christ, but I didn't realize how much this information changed my perspective.  Looking back, I realize that I no longer trusted the Churches of Christ to interpret scripture.  Our founding assumption that God wanted us to all interpret it personally seemed to be false.  Moreover, we were using it in a way that early Christians couldn't have, with chapters, verses, concordances and cherry-picking.  

How I Became a Humanist #7: Dan's Death

Dan was a member of our prayer group.  I didn't know him well, but we prayed together every week. We also confessed our sins to one another....

Joe, myself and a few others had just come back from a Skillet concert.  As we drove towards Barbier parking lot, we noticed several cars parked haphazardly around Dearborn Commons.  Through the window of the building I could see people quivering and hugging.  They looked to be crying.  Joe parked his car in Barbier and I headed over to Dearborn Commons.  There had been an accident.  Some of the students from the school had died.  Rochester College is small enough that all of the students tend to know each other - this is especially true of the students who live on campus.  You get to a point where you can recognize a person from half-way across campus, in the dark, simply by observing their gait.  Students from small liberal arts colleges will understand.

Ferndale/Hoggatt Halls and Dearborn Commons

Seeing one's own mortality in another's death affects everyone differently.  All the students and faculty were moved by the event in their own ways.  I'd had some things happen in my life over the last year or so that made me believe that following God as a Christian was the only thing that really mattered.  With Dan's death, I took religion to a whole new level.  Within about a month of Dan's death, I'd changed my major to religious studies/communication.  I began spending all of my spare time studying religion and doing spiritual things.  I read the Bible cover-to-cover three times over the next year.  This doesn't include the readings I did for classes or sermons.  It also doesn't include the readings I did with whatever young woman I happened to be dating.  Yeah, I was a hot date.

This was all happening at about the same time Emanuel's House was being born.  I was surrounded by people who were experiencing similar things.  It all fed on itself.  When the next semester hit and I began taking Bible, theology and church history classes, I went from being a sub-par student to finding myself with over a 3.0 GPA.  Soon after I was on the Dean's List.  This was a big deal for me.  Academic achievement was not a concern growing up.  The truth is, I didn't care about it even then.  I just happened to love my studies so much that an evening in the library was anything but a chore.

Like this Bible is highlighted, mine were always highlighted with comments written in the margins.  

Over the next three years, several things grew out of my religious intensity and my studies.  At first, I became something of a Charismatic Christian.  I began to ditch most of concern for Church of Christ doctrines, minus the sacraments and a preference for taking the first century Christianity seriously.  I became obsessed with biblical studies, Church history and with understanding the various expressions of Christianity.  This curiosity eventually led me to study both philosophy and other religions.  I'll write about all of these things and their affect on my faith in subsequent posts. 

How I Became a Humanist #5: Visiting the Disciples of Christ (Christian Church)

One summer, while working security, I saw a young woman walking out of the apartment complex holding a Bible.  We struck up a conversation.  She was headed to a Disciples of Christ church.  On account of my Church of Christ background, I was instantly curious.

The two denominations had originally been part of the same movement.  They began dividing after the American Civil War, mostly along the lines of north and south.  Like most northern churches, the Disciples of Christ were more liberal, both theologically and politically.  The southern Churches of Christ were more conservative.

The young woman invited me to come out one Sunday.  I took her up on the offer.  It would be my first time visiting a church outside the Churches of Christ.

I had expected the Disciples of Christ to differ only slightly from the Churches of Christ.  I knew, for example, that they used instruments and had missionary societies.  These were the main doctrinally contentious issues in the late 1800s that eventually caused the split.  It hadn't occurred to me that the churches had evolved since.

I stepped in to hear a pipe organ playing.  While I wasn't opposed to instrumental music any more, I didn't care for the organ.  The church had a female minister who shared the ministry with her husband.  I was slightly unnerved by their being a female minister.  The Churches of Christ teach that women are not supposed to teach or hold leadership in the church.

Like the Churches of Christ, the Disciples have their Communion Table Front and Center

If this had been all that had happened, I would have left the church an unchanged man.  But it wasn't.  During the service, the church read about 2 whole chapters of scripture. I'd never experienced anything like it.  Our churches read a few verses in support of the sermon.  This church read scripture for it's own sake.

The whole experience was a slap in the face to my Church of Christ upbringing.  I'd been taught that our churches were the only ones that read the Bible.  If that was true, why were they reading so much more of it in their services than we were?  Why were they reading it for its own sake when we weren't?  I admired the practice and was curious what others I might be missing out on.  I began to question my beliefs about other churches.  My faith in Church of Christ rhetoric had suffered a significant blow.  It would not recover.

Jesus and the Muslim Ban

Luke 10:25-29 

25 On one occasion an expert in the law stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he asked, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?”26 “What is written in the Law?” he replied. “How do you read it?”27 He answered, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’[c]; and, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’[d]”28 “You have answered correctly,” Jesus replied. “Do this and you will live.”29 But he wanted to justify himself, so he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”

This is my neighbor

A few weeks ago, I visited the Baha'i Center in DC.  While there I met people from a variety of different ethnic backgrounds.  Many were naturalized citizens who had originally come from Iran fleeing religious persecution.  I met one man whose brother had been executed for being Baha'i.  Next week, I'm headed to a Zoroastrian Temple to visit with them.  The Magi that visited Jesus in the book of Matthew were Zoroastrian priests.  Zoroastrians too are a persecuted minority throughout regions formerly controlled by the Persian Empire.  Many of them have fled to the United States, specifically from Iran.

The ban that has been put in place affects real people, many of whom are already suffering.  Some seek to live here.  Others already do either as citizens or residents.  Those who live here usually still have families who live overseas.  Imagine not being allowed to see your parents.

Mathew 2:13-23 tells us that after Jesus birth, Joseph took his family and fled to Egypt (They too were refugees) 

The way the ban was implemented makes things even worse.  You have families with children stuck all around the world.  They were planning to go from one place to another.  That trip may be all the family was budgeted for.  Imagine being stuck midway between a place you are fleeing and the place you are fleeing to and all of the sudden you aren't sure how you're going to feed your babies.  Governments around the world are having to deal with this problem.  So will their citizens.  The image of the US will be tarnished for some time.

When I think of these refugees, I look back at my own ancestry.  I have a lot of Dutch blood running through my veins, with ancestors on the north american continent going back to the early 1600s.  They came fleeing religious persecution in Europe to start a new life.  (Europe at the time was far worse the Middle East with people killing each other by the millions over views on communion and other nonsense.) If they hadn't had a place to go, I wouldn't be here.

Plymouth Rock: where Dutch Pilgrims landed

My statement on the Muslim Ban is this: the best way to improve vetting of individuals from more dangerous countries is to increase funding and hiring of the State Department staff that are responsible for vetting individuals.  If you have more staff and better funding, the vetting can be done more effectively and efficiently.  We won't have to break treaties to do this.  We won't have to leave persecuted refugees stranded at airports with their babies.  We won't have to ignore the people who are suffering because we decided to invade Iraq and didn't have a good plan for how to stabilize it afterward.  And we won't have to degrade our standing in the world by creating outrage among our allies, just in case global power is the only thing we really care about.

In response to the religious scholar's question, "Who is my neighbor?" Jesus tells a story, the moral of which is something like this: Your neighbor is the person who needs help.  Even the people you look down on know that.

Faith Friday: The Quakers (The Society of Friends)

I met with the Quakers last Sunday.  Like all Christians, they focus on some scriptures more than on others.  I messaged QuakerSpeak, a group that shares information about the Friends, and asked which scriptures they think Quakers focus on most.  They sent me this video.

When I considered their history, I couldn't help but want to add the following verse to the list.  How often it comes up among them, I can't say, but it does reflect one of their defining characteristics.  "There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus." (Galatians 3:28)

The following is a quote from George Fox's The Great Mystery.  Fox is considered the founder of Quakerism.

And the scriptures, which signify writings, outward writings, with paper and ink, are not, as you say, infallible, nor are they divine, but human, and men get a human knowledge from them; and so writings with paper and ink are not infallible, nor is the scripture the ground of faith, but Christ [is the ground], who was before the scripture was written; this the scripture tells you, and that God is divine; and the scriptures are the words of God, which Christ, the [W]ord, ends, who is the author of the faith. (SOURCE)

How "The Word of God" Shapes Doctrine

The question "What is the Word of God?" is the primary question that divides theological conservatives and theological liberals.  One's answer to this question will affect how he or she interprets the Bible.  If Jesus is the Word of God, perhaps the Bible needs to be taken seriously only insofar as it sheds like on Him.  If however, the Bible is the Word of God, then perhaps it should be taken literally.  The two faith claims aren't mutually exclusive, but theological liberals generally reject the idea that the Bible is the Word of God.  Similarly, where theological conservatives might refer to the Bible as the revelation, theological liberals usually use this word to refer to Jesus.

Understanding this is important not only for theological liberals and conservatives who don't understand each other.  It's also important for Humanists who might not understand the differences between Episcopalians and Southern Baptists.  Consider the issue of gay marriage.  An Episcopalian looking at the issue is likely to say, "knowing what we know today, what is a Jesus-like attitude towards gay marriage?"  A Southern Baptist, on the other hand will ask "What does the Bible say about homosexuality?"  Both questions are theologically coherent from their respective perspectives.

Comparing Baha'i with Christianity

When I visited the Baha'i Center in DC two weeks ago, I found myself comparing the Baha'i faith with Christianity.  I suppose this is only natural.  As I did this, I found several similarities.  This is especially true if one views Christianity through the lens of the early church.  Here are just a few observations.

• The Baha'i meet in houses, just like the earliest Christians
• They often have central houses for larger Sunday meetings, but not always
• During the week they meet in each other's houses for meals
• The main house is used for community events during the week (like AA meetings or yoga).
• They emphasize charitable work
• Early Christians stayed behind during plagues to care for the sick
• They paid for burial for the poor and took in orphans
• The Baha'i actively work on justice issues in their neighborhoods
• Like early Christians, they strongly encourage adoption
• They emphasize fellowship
• Early Christian worship usually involved a communal meal that culminated in the Eucharist
• The Baha'i Center is built for fellowship.
• The Baha'i meet in each other's homes for a meal during the week.  They call these Fireside chats.

Even their claim that Baha'i is a successor to previous revelations is a Christian theological move. From the beginning Christians have claimed that their religion was a natural successor to Judiasm, and that their savior fulfilled Jewish prophesy.  The Baha'is claim that Baha'ullah is the return of Jesus, because Jesus comes again and again to different cultures with different names.  They claim that Baha'i is the fulfillment of the prophesy that Jesus would come again.  And just like Christians see the Old Testament as instructive, but not binding because it's part of an older covenant, the Baha'is see older scriptures as instructive, but not binding because they are part of earlier revelations for earlier time periods.

While Christians didn't adopt non-Jewish scriptures, their early apologists sometimes claimed that Jesus was the fulfillment of pagan religions hopes or even prophesies.

• Paul claims that his God is the unknown God that pagans are worshiping Act 17:23
• Zoroastrian Magi visit Jesus in Matthew 2
• The Zoroastrians had a prophesy that the Savior would be born of a virgin
• They also believed in a Holy Spirit through which goodness is revealed - the ideas are not identical.
• Matthew doesn't directly say that Jesus is the fulfillment of Zoroastrian prophesy, but this is probably the only logical conclusion to draw.  

The place that I found the traditions most aligned, however, was in the idea of the Kingdom of Heaven.  When talking about the Kingdom of Heaven, Jesus preaches a certain kind of moral life.  It's one where the peacemakers, rather than the war hawks, are honored.  It's one where his followers don't judge, because the standard they use will be used against them.  It's one where they love their neighbors and their enemies.  Jesus' Kingdom of Heaven is a new social order his followers bring to earth through faith, love and action.

Baha'is also use the term "Kingdom of Heaven."  I'm not sure if they mean the same thing, but the idea of God's servants bringing peace and justice to the world through love, action and faith is a dominant Baha'i theme.

The two religions fail to see eye-to-eye in several respects.  Most Christians see Jesus as God, but Baha'i see his as a divine man/being who continually returns to humanity to reveal God's will.  Christians are not likely to accept the idea of Jesus returning as a teacher, rather than a divine being calling them up into the sky.
Baha'is don't seem to think that Jesus died for the removal of their sins.  I didn't ask.  The topic never came up.  Evangelicals in particular are unlikely to agree with the Baha'i understanding of Heaven and Hell.  Most Evangelicals believe that Jesus (as defined by Christianity) is the only way to Heaven.  Several even believe that their particular sect of Christianity is the only sure guarantee.  Baha'is, on the other hand, think that one's spiritual development on earth will continue along the same path in the afterlife, regardless of dogma.

Certainly other comparisons and contrasts could be made, but I know too little to say more.

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Thank you!

If you have a religious tradition you'd like to learn more about, let me know in the comments below and I'll try to visit and write about it.

Human Behavior versus Faith in God

 20Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar. For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen. 21And he has given us this command: Anyone who loves God must also love their brother and sister. 
1 John 4:20-21 

Human behavior was a recurring theme in my struggle with faith. It's wasn't just that Christians hurt or disappointed me; it was that I often found non-Christians morally impressive by comparison. While many of my Christian friends claim that this shouldn't cast doubt on Christianity, I've never been convinced.

A Common Internet Meme on the Subject

 One of the main reasons for this comes from Christian scripture.  Paul claims that the fruits of the Spirit are moral in nature.  Jesus claims that "you will know them by their fruits," and "they will know you are my disciples by the love you have for one another."  Christianity claims that it's adherents will be more moral than non-Christians through their faith and the power of the Holy Spirit.

Reason supports this too.  Christianity is an ethical religion, one that claims to help make you a more moral person.  Therefore, if Christians do not tend to be more moral than their non-Christian counterparts, the religion is suspect.  How can a religion's claims about God or the afterlife be trusted if the present appear to be false?

My point is not necessarily that Christians are less moral than non-Christians.  How would one even quantify the variables necessary to prove such a statement?  What does one mean by Christian?  Should we take our meaning from the Gospel of John or from the Gospel of Luke?  Should we defer to Walter Rauschenbusch or Billy Graham?  The Latter Day Saints or the Greek Orthodox?  Is Christianity about following Jesus, or is it a set of beliefs?  If you identify as Christian, you'll have to determine these things for yourself.

Billy Graham: American Evangelist

My point is this.  Your behavior testifies about the value of your way of life, whatever that way of life is.  It doesn't matter if you're Christian, Muslim, Jew, or Pastafarian.  If the way of life you claim isn't producing the results it claims to, then your philosophy will be scrutinized.  Of course, others will do some of that scrutinizing.  But we should be doing this ourselves.  We should be testing our ways of life to ensure that we are either getting what we want from them, or becoming who we want to be.  We should be asking the following questions.

• Does my philosophy of life give me the things it promises? 
• On average, do I have these things/attributes more than people who follow a different way of life?  
• If not, why not?
  
  This reflection is based on my series How I Became a Humanist Part 3
  
  
  (All Christian Scriptures taken from the NIV)