Postscript to “The Danger in Being Ministerial”

When I wrote my recent post, “The Danger in Being Ministerial,” I omitted a couple of points.

For one thing, the priest/ess vs. pastor — or cultus vs. social ministry — distinction is largely rhetorical. I do not mean to say that they cannot overlap, only that often they do not.

Also, I am surprised that no follower of Jesus pointed out a hole big enough to drive the First Baptist Church’s Sunday School bus through, to wit, for at least some Christians, ministry is in fact cultus. But then not too many Christians read this blog.

After all, a famous passage in the Gospel of Matthew has Jesus telling his disciples that to aid the unfortunate is to honor (or worship him): “Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.”

And if you focus on that teaching, you can sidestep the theological problem that has haunted Christianity since the first century CE: exactly who or what was Jesus?

Was he a mortal prophet? A would-be sacred king? A mortal prophet who was “adopted” and “exalted” by God?  A preexisting angel who was made the Son of God? Or was he an aspect or persona of the One God all along, since forever, sort of?

As Bart Ehrman points out in How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee, all of those viewpoints were common, even orthodox, at different times.

And what was orthodox in one generation could get you excommunicated in the next — at least until the First Council of Nicea, which under imperial patronage hammered out what they called a creed, but which is easier to understand if you read it like a property lease.

Just as your rental house lease tells you, for example, that you cannot store inoperable, unlicensed motor vehicles on the premises, the Creed tells you what ways of thinking about Jesus are permissible. Every phrase drives nails into some so-called heresy or unorthodox interpretation.

Ehrman’s book is written for the non-specialist. He avoids technical language like apotheosis. He relies mainly on the accepted New Testament — the four gospels and those epistles of Paul that scholars think Paul actually wrote (not all of them) — with only occasional borrowings from the Gnostic gospels, etc.

His arguments construct a chronology of Jesuses. For instance, Paul’s epistles, which can be dated fairly closely, were written down before the Gospels and the book of Acts, even though the events in them postdate the gospels.

Ehrman argues that Paul’s Jesus was an angel who took human form, which fits in with Paul’s own experience — he never saw Jesus in person, although their lives overlapped and he met people who knew Jesus, but instead his claim to being an expert on Jesus came from a visionary experience that left him temporarily blind and disoriented.

How someone could be both human and divine at the same time was and is a problem for Christians. Ehrman gives his view of how Christians wrestled with that problem, and of course his Christian critics cry, “He’s got it wrong!

As a final criticism, Ehrman posits that the key to Paul’s Christology is that he thought of Jesus as an (or the) angel (of God/the Lord).  That, says Ehrman, explains how Paul could ascribe “pre-existence” to Jesus, and how, as a devout Jew, he could countenance worshipping Jesus.  As the key basis for this notion, Ehrman invokes a peculiar reading of Galatians 4:14, where Paul says that in his initial visit the Galatians received him “as an angel of God, as Christ Jesus.”  Ehrman insists that this is to be read as a flat appositive construction, in which “an angel of God” = “Christ Jesus.”   But this isn’t actually as compelling a claim as he thinks.  Even Gieschen (on whose work Ehrman relies here) presents this reading of the construction as only a distinct “possibility.”  And most scholars (myself included) don’t think it really works.  The grammar certainly doesn’t require it, and it seems more reasonable to take it as a kind of stair-step statement, “angel of God” and “Christ Jesus” as ascending categories.

You see, Christianity is easy. All you have to do is interpret 2,000-year-old documents written by people to whom Greek often was a second language,  making sure that your sense of the words’ meaning and connotation is the same as theirs.

Or just do what the man in the pulpit tells you to do.

Mythic or esoteric explanations are missing, because this is a book about small o-orthodox Christianity pointed at educated readers-who-probably-were-raised-as-Christians — like Ehrman, who says that his own journey runs backwards compared to christology, from Jesus as an aspect of a Trinitarian God to Jesus as mortal prophet.

Read How Jesus Became God to be up to speed on the history of christology, and given the complexity of the subject, maybe you will understand why many Christians do not even want to think about it, preferring instead to make statements like this:

If you understand that most people are controlled and compelled by fear, then you will understand how hard it is to keep a church going that doesn’t teach about “paying for your sins in hell,” but rather how we bring God into our everyday acts [sic], how God can be here and now, not some nebulous, angry entity who is waiting to judge you when you die, how Jesus didn’t come to die for all of us horrible people, but to teach us about a radical way of loving unconditionally and all-inclusively and that Love is the answer to heal a broken world.

That is one of my former students writing on her Facebook page about her church.

A lot of the clergy actually don’t think that Jesus was divine anyway, if you pin them down. So where does that leave the cultus angle? Do you need a divinity for that? I would say yes, but there are ways to talk yourself out of that corner.

 

Marion Zimmer Bradley, Greenpeace, and the Donatists

Back in the 4th century CE, Western Christianity had a problem. During the Emperor Diocletian’s persecution of Christians, which began in 303 and was severe in some areas, some Christian clergy in the Berber communities of North Africa had surrendered copies of Scripture and otherwise complied with the emperor’s edicts.

When Diocletian was replaced by the pro-Christian Constantine, the hold-outs who had resisted the persecution denounced the first group as impure. Led by a bishop named Donatus, they argued that clergy who had followed imperial orders were sinners who could no longer baptize or celebrate the Eucharist.

But the bishops in Rome, busy hitching the Christian church to the imperial chariot, said no, it’s all good. Or in Latin, ex opere operato, meaning that even if the priest is a sinner, the sacrament is still valid because it comes from God.

I heard this argument from an environmentalist friend yesterday in regard to the news stories about the European Greenpeace executive who commutes to work twice a week by airplane, even as Greenpeace itself campaigns against air travel.

“This kind of bad-example-setting undercuts the message,” I said.

“The organization’s work is still more important,” she said. Ex opere operato. Or as another Catholic once said, “The church may be a whore, but she is still our mother.”

I thought about the Donatists when the news broke last March about well-known Pagan musician Kenny Klein’s arrest on child-pornography charges.  Am I now supposed to smash my Fishbird CD and delete those tracks from my iPod? Or can I say, “Ex opere operato“?

Now it’s Marion Zimmer Bradley. That her husband Walter Breen was an aggressive pedophile is old news. But now the finger points at her: it’s all summed up here.

So who is throwing away their copies of The Mists of Avalon? Or is there an escape clause for artistic works? Is the creative act the equivalent of a religious sacrament? Must we judge the creation according to the morals of the creator or may we invoke the religion of Art: ex opere operato?

Oh yeah, Greenpeace executive Pascal Husting will now take the train, it is said. He made a “misjudgment.” But read the  comment st the Guardian website by “E McBain”: it sounds like one rule for the clergy and one for the rest of us.

‘Cosmos’ Misrepresents Giordano Bruno

Neil Degrasse Tyson’s remake of Cosmos tries to remake Giordano Bruno as a martyr of modern science, but he was nothing of the kind.

He was a lot more of an occultist. Even The Daily Beast gets it.

As Discover magazine’s Corey Powell pointed out, the philosophers of the 16th century weren’t anything like scientists in the modern sense. Bruno, for instance, was a “pandeist,” which is the belief that God had transformed himself into all matter and ceased to exist as a distinct entity in himself. He believed in all sort of magic and spirits, and extrapolated those views far beyond his ideas about the infinity of the universe. In contrast to contemporaries who drew more modest conclusions from their similar ideas, Bruno agitated for an elaborate counter-theology, and was (unlike the poor, humble outcast portrayed in Cosmos) supported by powerful royal benefactors. The church didn’t even have a position on whether the Earth orbited the sun, and didn’t bring it up at Bruno’s trial. While the early-modern religious persecution certainly can’t be denied, Bruno was killed because he flamboyantly denied basic tenets of the Catholic faith, not because religious authorities were out to suppress all “freedom of thought.”

The ‘Pentecostal Drift’ and Modern Paganism

Religion blogger Peter Berger, melding articles from  The Tablet (Roman Catholic) and The Christian Century (mainline Protestant) notes “the major demographic shift in world Christianity—the fact that more Christians now live in the Global South: Asia, Africa, Latin America—than in the old Christian homelands of Europe and North America.”

With this shift goes huge growth in Pentecostal Christianity—Protestant churches emphasizing ecstatic worship and the “gifts of the Holy Spirit,” such as speaking in tongues and faith-healing. (The modern Pentecostal movement began in Los Angeles in 1906—the same month as the great San Francisco earthquake and fire. Some of them see a connection.)

In 1970 Pentecostals were 5% of world Christians; today the figure is 25%! 80% of Christian converts in Asia are Pentecostal! I’m not quite clear how this arithmetic is worked out, but the Christian Century story asserts that one of twelve people alive today is Pentecostal! Not surprisingly, the [recent Pentecostal World Conference] in Kuala Lumpur was “young, vibrant and confident”. No stepping around quietly so as not to offend Muslim sensitivities!

There is, for example, major competition between (often Pentecostal) Christians and Muslims for conversions in sub-Saharan Africa. Sometimes it is bloody—see the recent news from Nigeria and the Central African Republic, for example. Some conflicts that are not religious on the surface become divided on religious lines.

So what is the Pagan angle? For one, Pentecostal Christians (and many Muslims) see the world as a scene of spiritual warfare. (See, for instance, “Saudi Arabia’s War on Witchcraft.”) Both groups battle demons and “demonic” practitioners.  Consequently, followers of traditional animist/polythestic religions as well as new Pagans are going to continue to be targeted.

If you are reading this, chances are that you live in a culture where the notions of religious freedom and individual religious choice have at least some weight. But from a global perspective, isn’t that a minority view — no matter how many interfaith congresses and parliaments there are?

I am all for religious freedom, but much of the world has a very limited idea as to what that means.

What Did Jesus Know about Rome?

Jesus healing the centurion’s servant. Paolo Veronese, 16th century (Wikimedia Commons).

An interesting short essay in which a historian conjectures just how much Jesus of Nazareth would have known about the Roman Empire, in which he lived. The assumption is that he spoke Greek as a second language; otherwise, how did he communicate with Pontius Pilate, not to mention the centurion of the miracle?

Heathenry and the Politics of Postcolonialism

Thad Horrell, Heathen and graduate student, hurls himself against the issue of post-colonialism and reconstructed Northern religion in this article, “Heathenry as a Postcolonial Movement,” published in the online Journal of Religion, Identity and Politics, written by students in his PhD program.

His thesis is “that Heathenry is ‘postcolonial’  in complex and contradictory senses of the term. It both acknowledges and offers resistance to the imperialism of Christendom, while simultaneously trivializing colonialism and making it seem merely a thing of the past.”

I will argue that Heathenry is a postcolonial movement both in the sense that it combats and challenges elements of colonial history and the contemporary expectations derived from it (anti-colonial), and in the much more problematic sense that it serves to justify current social and racial inequalities by pushing the structures of colonialism off as a thing of the past (pro-colonial). Rather than promoting a sense of solidarity with colonized populations, Heathen critiques of colonialism and imperialism often serve to justify disregard for claims of oppression by colonized minorities. After all, if we’ve all been colonized, what is there to complain about?

This trope of resistance is employed in academic writing as well as “insider” writing. It shines through Carole Cusack’s recent Pomegranate article on the emperor Charlemagne’s “jihad” (to borrow an appropriate term) against the Pagan Saxons: “Pagan Saxon Resistance to Charlemagne’s Mission: ‘Indigenous’ Religion and ‘World’ Religion in the Early Middle Ages.”

The ideas of invasion, colonization, and resistance were important in the first years of Wicca too, although not so much since the 1950s.

Gerald Gardner played the nativist card as well, implicitly conflating the threatened invasion of southern England by the German army in 1940 with the “Gregorian mission” that brought Christianity to Anglo-Saxon England in the sixth century. (The earlier Celtic-speaking post-colonial-Roman Britain had been heavily Christian as well by the end.)

But the idea of resistance to “invasion” has put down deeper roots in contemporary Norse, Baltic, and Slavic Paganism than in the Anglosphere, I think.

Is the Church of England Desperate or Just Confused about Paganism?

With the obvious news peg of summer solstice celebrations at Stonehenge, the Telegraph reports on a rather odd initiative from the Church of England. The article begins,

The church is training ministers to create “a pagan church where Christianity [is] very much in the centre” to attract spiritual believers.

Ministers are being trained to create new forms of Anglicanism suitable for people of alternative beliefs as part of a Church of England drive to retain congregation numbers.

Reverend Steve Hollinghurst, a researcher and adviser in new religious movements told the BBC: “I would be looking to formulate an exploration of the Christian faith that would be at home in their culture.”

He said it would be “almost to create a pagan church where Christianity was very much in the centre.”

To which I can only ask, what are they talking about? Is this Christianity with mistletoe and pentacles? Do they think that they can attract the “party Pagans” to drum circles in the parish hall? The article continues,

The Church Mission Society, which is training ministers to “break new ground”, hopes to see a number of spiritual people align themselves with Christianity.

Andrea Campenale, of the Church Mission Society, said: “Nowadays people, they want to feel something; they want to have some sense of experience.

There is that.

Related: a Church Mission Society article on “being the light of Christ” at a Pagan festival in 2012. They gave free henna tattoos and did card readings with the “Jesus Deck.”

UPDATE: An Anglican priest involved says that the Telegraph’s article overstated what was going on.

i do not believe that a Christian church could adopt Paganism and remain Christian nor that a Pagan group (or individual) could adopt Christianity and remain Pagan. i do think that Paganism has much to say and offer to the world today and much that Christians can adopt – for instance whilst Christianity isn’t polytheistic, the Trinity does include the divine feminine as well as the divine masculine and those, including Pagans, who have criticized an apparently male lone christian deity are right to do so, and we as Christians need to acknowledge that and recover out own tradition of the divine feminine. similarly Pagans have often put Christians to shame when it comes to the environment when St Paul time and again talks of Jesus not saving people from the world but wanting to set the whole of creation free from suffering – we need to recover this ecological vision. i could go on but i hope you get the idea – that is what i meant by saying a Pagan church – on reflection i think i should have said a church in Pagan culture or one that learnt lessons from Paganism.

A Country “Under Christian Occupation”

The BBC profiles some Hellenes — modern Greek Pagans — with minimal snark.

Tryphon Olympios leads many of the ceremonies (BBC).

[The summer solstice is] the most important annual festival for followers of The Return of the Hellenes – a movement trying to bring back the religion, values, philosophy and way of life of ancient Greece, more than 16 centuries after it was replaced by Christianity

These people consider Greece to be a country under Christian occupation.

(Not to mention nearly four hundred years of Muslim occupation as well.)

The followers are an odd mix. There are New Age types who revere ancient traditions, leftists who resent the power of the Orthodox Church, and Greek nationalists who see Christianity as having destroyed everything that was truly Greek.

As the modern-day ancients relax in their camp at the base of the mountain, a few sell philosophy books, CDs, food and jewellery. Some wear modern clothes, others togas [sic], and a few sport a wreath.

No, Matthew Brunwasser, every ancient garment is not a “toga.”

‘Non-Christian’ License Plate Prompts Oklahoma Lawsuit

An Oklahoma court has cleared the way for Methodist clergyman Keith Cressman to sue the state over his objection to  imagery on that state’s license plate.

The new license plates carry a photo of a statue called “Prayer for Rain,” of an Apache man shooting an arrow into the sky.

His 2011 lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Oklahoma City seeks a court order allowing him either to cover up the image on his plates or to get a personalized plate for the same cost as a standard license plate.

“Mr. Cressman’s (lawsuit) states a plausible compelled speech claim,” the appellate judges wrote Tuesday in a 39-page decision, reversing Judge Joe Heaton’s dismissal of the lawsuit. “He has alleged sufficient facts to suggest that the ‘Sacred Rain Arrow’ image on the standard Oklahoma license plate conveys a particularized message that others are likely to understand and to which he objects.”

Oklahoma has used American Indian imagery on license plates before, but something about this one evidently pushed the Rev. Cressman’s buttons.

Sigh. Maybe they should make a plain black and white plate for militant monotheists.