Love or Power?
Or Why Theological Formation?
I’m reading a book right now called Warriors of God: Richard the Lionhart and Saladin in the Third Crusade. I’ve always been fascinated by the Crusades perhaps because it is such an amazing example of how Christian faith can become so terribly misconstrued. The author, James Reston Jr., tells the story of the slow process whereby the gospel of Jesus and the cross was transformed into a religion of violence. The Crusaders loved and worshipped a God who they believed called for the death of the heathen. They transformed the cross into a sword. They chose a religion of power rather than a gospel of love. Power is seductive, self-sacrificial love is, well, self-sacrificial love. Who enjoys self-sacrifice?
Muslims still resent Christians for the Crusades. When the Crusaders finally conquered Jerusalem in the summer of 1099, they virtually wiped out every living creature in the city; both the Jews and Muslims. They wept tears of joy and sang the Te Deum afterward. Saladin the Muslim displayed a more Christ-like compassion later when he took the city back again and allowed virtually all the occupants to go for a fee. Several thousand of those unable to pay were sold into slavery but the rest were allowed to leave the city. The Bishop of Jerusalem scraped the gold off the walls of the temple, not to pay the fee for those would could not pay for theselves, but to preserve the riches for the church. Many poor could have been spared, but as a consequence of the bishop’s heartlessness, they were sold into slavery.
How can the gospel be so misconstrued? What lessons do past abuses of power teach today? Power is as seductive today as it was in 1099. In the gospel, we encounter a God who has chosen the way of self-sacrificial love rather than violence. The cross is not just a symbol. It is a reminder of God’s choice to take the brunt of human wickedness and its punishment to let the guilty go free. We need to see this for what it is: a rejection of violence and a choice for love. To choose power is to reject this gospel.
But the role of the church is to do more than to teach the cross in terms of history and theology. We are called to do the more difficult work of shaping our lives by the gospel. Every choice for violence is a rejection of the spirit of the Savior. Spiritual formation takes seriously the task of shaping each believer into the image of God’s self-giving love. This is the task Jesus left for the church. This is the meaning of Jesus’ command to his disciples to take up their cross and follow. The Crusades remind us of how tragically the church can go astray. Similar dangers remain whenever Christians choose something other than the narrow way of Jesus.
Showing posts with label Christian anti-Semitism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Christian anti-Semitism. Show all posts
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
Thursday, August 20, 2009
Toward a Theology of World Religions
This I wrote for a sermon on world religions and inter-faith conversation. I did a sermon series on world religions in 2006 and thought I would post this here.
The Issue at Hand
At some point in our lives, we all encounter people of differing religions. Our children will learn about other religions in school and will often have friends of different religions. Would you believe that Somerset has a Mosque and that Johanna had Hindu and Muslim friends in her class. I used to eat with Johanna and talk to her Indian Hindu friend Kodgil. We live in a world that is very different from the world we grew up in. Yet many of us know very little about the other major world religions and some of us know only a slanted version.
It is essential, in light of this fact, to seek to understand other religions better and to build bridges of understanding. How can we reach out to those with the message of Jesus if we have absolutely no idea what they believe? We are going to examine the five major religions of the world. But I’m going to start, in this sermon, talking about how we think about this? How can we be faithful to our Christian heritage and yet be openhearted with those of other religions? This can be threatening because we are forced to ask, “What if there is truth in other religions? Can my faith withstand serious consideration of other religions?” We should all feel a little uncomfortable but that doesn’t mean we should not ask these questions. We really must.
I have this experience often in class. When I lecture on Confucian, Platonic or Stoic thought, you would be amazed how many of the more devout Christian kids perk up. I’ll often say, “This sounds surprisingly familiar, doesn’t it?” “Yeah, it sounds very Christian” is their response. “Well, you aren’t the first to notice,” I respond. Christians have been reading Plato and the Stoics from the start. Virtually every Christian theologian in the early church had been schooled in Plato and the Stoics and quoted them with great regularity and fervor. They were plundering Egypt – that is, they were taking the very best of their cultural heritage and applying it to their Christian worldview.
The Problem: The Uniqueness of Jesus
On the other hand, people can go way overboard here. We need to remember that Jesus claimed to be – and the church confesses Jesus to be – the unique Son of God. “No one comes to the Father but through me” (John 14:6). All religions which claim to have something true to say, must, of necessity, also say something about the untruthfulness of other religions and philosophies. You can hardly get out of this – and it is true of anything claimed to be true in any area of life – not just religion. Many devout Christians are worried about Jesus’ exclusive claims to deity and truth and simply do not have the heart to agree with what Jesus himself seems to have claimed for himself.
Jesus was unique in his qualifications as the son of God – the one “whom the prophets foretold” (Acts 3:18)
Jesus is unique in his achievements – “There is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved” (Act 4:12)
Jesus is unique in his resurrection – “The one whom God raised from the dead” (Acts 4:10).
Key Point - The uniqueness in who he is and his efficacy as our savior from sin lies at the heart of Christian faith. This brings up two questions.
What must we say about other religions? Are they completely without truth? If there is truth in them, from whence does it come? Why such diversity?
What about those who have never heard? Are they all going to hell? None?
What about Other Religions?
Does the fact that Jesus is the unique Son of God and Savior of the world imply that all those outside of Christian revelation are completely misguided? One way of saying this is as follows: While in Christ we have infallible truth, outside of the Church are truths which can be instructive and of value. These truths arise from several facts.
1) Everyone in a universe that shouts the glory of God. The Psalmist said, “The heavens declare God’s glory.”
2) Everyone is made in God’s image (Gen 1:27) which gives them a certain conscience and knowledge of right and wrong. Every religions has something like a golden rule. Paul in Rom. 2 tells of those who do not know the actual law of Moses but who fulfill the law of God written on their hearts. Job was seen by the early church as a gentile who fulfilled God’s laws written on his heart and was blameless before God.
3) every heart hungers for God and for salvation.
4) In Methodism we talk about the prevenient grace of God which works in all persons drawing them to the truth of Christ. We not only know the laws by nature, we have a certain ability to understand and comply. Methodists have traditionally called this prevenient grace.
In other words, when we think about other religions, we do not think about people who have absolutely no access to divine Grace. Traditional theology tells us otherwise. Let me put this differently. CS Lewis in Mere Christianity says that when he was an atheist, he was forced by his worldview to be intolerant of all religions. They were all fundamentally false and misguided about the basic truth of reality. There is no god or gods or God or spirit or angels or forces or anything but matter. When he became a Christian he could take a more tolerant liberal view about other religions as well. While he might not agree with the understandings of Muslim about the nature of the deity and the questions of God’s incarnation in Christ, he could agree with the Muslim on many things. God exists, is personal, and demands humility and divine service. The same is true of all other religions. Becoming a Christian helped him take a more liberal view of other religions.
Bishop Lesslie Newbiggin was a bishop on South India for forty years and wrote extensively about world religions. He knew many persons who had converted to Christianity from other religions. He noted that they experienced both continuity and discontinuity. They had a clear sense that they had to serve Christ and Christ alone. Yet they also knew that it had been Jesus who was dealing with them all along in the pre-Christian searching.
Why the Diversity?
If this is the case, why so many different religions? People believe very different things about God; surely God could have made clear which is the right path. To some people, the sheer number of religious options shows that religion is a human invention. Yet, the fact that virtually all human beings have religions or spiritual quests of some sort point to the reality of God and the fact that God made us to long for him. The spiritual longings which are so ubiquitous is a fact itself that cries out for explanation and the best explanation for it is simple: God made us in his image and shaped us to live in relationship with Him.
The multiplicity of opinion is to be expected. Adam Hamilton points out that often, when he sees a movie with his wife, and discusses it later, he wonders if they saw the same movie! They both experienced it so differently and thought of such different meanings to the exact same film. Paul tells us, “We know only in part . . . For now we see in a mirror dimly” (I Cor 13:9, 12). God allows religious differences, in part the way a parent lets a child struggle to learn. If you are teaching your children how to spell, you don’t say, “pencil – now that is p, e, n, c, i, l.” They would never learn to spell. You have to let them struggle to learn. I think in all religions we see God allowing humans to struggle with the ultimate questions of life. God could simply open the heavens and say, “Look, you humans. Christ is my son and you all need to be saved by believing in him.” God could do that but chooses not to. He wants us to struggle, we who see in the mirror darkly. Religious diversity is part of that struggle.
We see this struggle right in the pages of the Bible. If you were in our OT class, it has been something of a theme of the class. You can see the development of ideas and thinking about God right in the pages of the Bible. You have to close your eyes not to see it. God choose Abraham to follow him, even thought Abraham was certainly not a full monotheist the way Isaiah was. Moses brought the laws of God on Mt. Sinai but is constantly updating the law for new situations as they arise. God gave the law – you would think it would be perfect from the start. But Moses has to go back to God and say, “What about this?” And God gives a more defined law (for example: Num 27:1-11 and 36:1-13). It happens over and over. Jesus adds new light to what was previously known about God.
How Should we View Other Religions?
Did you realize that only 1/3 of the world’s population have an affiliation to Christianity. Two thirds of the world’s population are not Christians. They long to know truth and seek to serve God and their fellow humans as they best understand. God formed these persons also from their mother’s womb as Ps 139 notes. So what about other religions: Will they be saved? Here are three perspectives.
The Pluralist Perspective claims that all religions are equally valid paths to the Ultimate Reality of the universe. All religions are at their core saying and believing and experiencing the same divine reality in the world. “Your truth is true for you if it is honestly held and internally consistent.”
This has problems for me for three reasons. First, it fails to be faithful to the uniqueness of Jesus we outlined above. If Jesus is the unique Son of God, that truth must trump all other truths and be of ultimate importance. Second, I don’t think this really honors other religions. If a Muslim hears a religious pluralist, he isn’t going to agree and say, “Yes, Islam is really teaching the same thing as Christianity.” A Hindu may come closer to agreeing but in the end he’ll want to say, “Yes, but Hinduism is not the same as your religion. We believe things that are fundamentally different.” While the pluralist wants to honor other religions, he fails to do so. Thirdly, different religions teach exactly the opposite things in many regards. The Muslim fundamentalist who believes that Mohammed was Allah’s prophet doesn’t have much in common with the Theravada Buddhist who doesn’t believe in a deity of any type at all. These religions cannot be boiled down to an essential unity.
The Exclusivist Perspective is at the other end of the spectrum. It states simply that those who do not believe in Jesus will all go to hell out of sheer necessity. It does not matter how devout they are or how closely they follow moral beliefs and lifestyles. They simply had not been given the opportunity to believe in Jesus who is the only way, the only truth, the only life (John 14:6 again). We will consider this passage again.
The Inclusivist Perspective says that Jesus is in fact the only basis of salvation – no one is saved other than through the work of Christ – but that one does not have to know Jesus during this life to be saved by Him. Salvation is available to those who profess other religions but by means of the hidden Christ. One who throws themselves upon God’s mercy in this life is essentially throwing themselves into the arms of Christ without knowing it. This person knows that they have done wrong and feel contrition about this wrong. They do not understand historically who Jesus was and what Jesus has done to solve the problem, but God judges them as if they did understand. God judges them on the basis of what they know.
The biblical text comes in Luke 18: the parable of the Pharisee and the publican. The publican or tax collector simply beat his chest and said, “God have mercy on me, a sinner.” He never believed in Jesus or knew about Jesus in Jesus own parable. But Jesus says that he went up from the temple justified before God that day. This is an important truth: the essential prayer of all those who repent is, “Lord, have mercy on me a sinner.” This prayer activates God’s saving grace which historically depends upon Jesus even when the person does not fully understand this. I must add that John Wesley was an inclusivist and on several occasions wrote about this.
The Last Battle
Adam Hamilton in his book of World Religions quotes CS Lewis’ The Last Battle. In this tale, Emeth (which means truth in Hebrew although I don’t know if Lewis intended this) meets Aslan in final judgment. Emeth had been a devoted worshipper of Tash – a different deity - his whole life. When he comes face to face with Aslan (who represents Jesus) he expects to be put to death. He realizes he’s been mistaken and worshipping the wrong deity. Here is his encounter with Aslan.
He touched my forehead . . . and said, “Son thou art welcome.” But I said, “Alas, Lord, I am no son of Thine but the servant of Tash.” He answered, “Child, all the service thou hast done to Tash I account as service done to me.” Then I asked, “Are Thou and Tash one?” The Lion growled so that the earth shook . . . and said, “It is false. Not because he and I are one but because he and I are opposites, I take to me the services which thou hast done to him. . . “ I said, “I have been seeking Tash all my days. . .” The Glorious one said, “Unless thy desire had been for me thou wouldst not have sought so long and so truly. For all find what they truly seek.”
Paul in Phil. 2:10 says “every knee will bend and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.” Those who didn’t know the Lordship of Christ in this life will, as Emeth did, when he encounter Jesus will realize that they were worshipping Christ implicitly all along. You may ask, “Then why should we obey the commission of Jesus to make Christian disciples of all nations?” We should tell them because Christ is indeed the way, the truth and the life; he gives us the most complete picture and relationship with God available. We offer Christ to provide assurance of salvation and simply because Jesus commanded us to do so.
Conclusion
My desire for you is that you will struggle with these questions. I’m not an expert but I’ve read and thought about these questions a lot. I’ve chosen to say, “I not only can learn about other religions respectfully, I can learn from then in ways that are helpful to my own faith walk. I can do that and be absolutely faithful to Jesus and to my Christian heritage.”
My hope is that you will be openhearted. Remember that we will also discover where other religions contradict Christian teachings and we will humbly reject them at that point. I hope that this will help you grow in your Christian walk and help us all develop the kinds of spiritual sensitivity that helps us be better witnesses to the resurrection power of Jesus Christ. We can only effectively bear witness to Christ if we have faithfully understood what other religions presently believe. I believe we set out on this pilgrimage out of a direct desire to be faithful to Jesus and to his calling to bear witness to his name.
The Issue at Hand
At some point in our lives, we all encounter people of differing religions. Our children will learn about other religions in school and will often have friends of different religions. Would you believe that Somerset has a Mosque and that Johanna had Hindu and Muslim friends in her class. I used to eat with Johanna and talk to her Indian Hindu friend Kodgil. We live in a world that is very different from the world we grew up in. Yet many of us know very little about the other major world religions and some of us know only a slanted version.
It is essential, in light of this fact, to seek to understand other religions better and to build bridges of understanding. How can we reach out to those with the message of Jesus if we have absolutely no idea what they believe? We are going to examine the five major religions of the world. But I’m going to start, in this sermon, talking about how we think about this? How can we be faithful to our Christian heritage and yet be openhearted with those of other religions? This can be threatening because we are forced to ask, “What if there is truth in other religions? Can my faith withstand serious consideration of other religions?” We should all feel a little uncomfortable but that doesn’t mean we should not ask these questions. We really must.
I have this experience often in class. When I lecture on Confucian, Platonic or Stoic thought, you would be amazed how many of the more devout Christian kids perk up. I’ll often say, “This sounds surprisingly familiar, doesn’t it?” “Yeah, it sounds very Christian” is their response. “Well, you aren’t the first to notice,” I respond. Christians have been reading Plato and the Stoics from the start. Virtually every Christian theologian in the early church had been schooled in Plato and the Stoics and quoted them with great regularity and fervor. They were plundering Egypt – that is, they were taking the very best of their cultural heritage and applying it to their Christian worldview.
The Problem: The Uniqueness of Jesus
On the other hand, people can go way overboard here. We need to remember that Jesus claimed to be – and the church confesses Jesus to be – the unique Son of God. “No one comes to the Father but through me” (John 14:6). All religions which claim to have something true to say, must, of necessity, also say something about the untruthfulness of other religions and philosophies. You can hardly get out of this – and it is true of anything claimed to be true in any area of life – not just religion. Many devout Christians are worried about Jesus’ exclusive claims to deity and truth and simply do not have the heart to agree with what Jesus himself seems to have claimed for himself.
Jesus was unique in his qualifications as the son of God – the one “whom the prophets foretold” (Acts 3:18)
Jesus is unique in his achievements – “There is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved” (Act 4:12)
Jesus is unique in his resurrection – “The one whom God raised from the dead” (Acts 4:10).
Key Point - The uniqueness in who he is and his efficacy as our savior from sin lies at the heart of Christian faith. This brings up two questions.
What must we say about other religions? Are they completely without truth? If there is truth in them, from whence does it come? Why such diversity?
What about those who have never heard? Are they all going to hell? None?
What about Other Religions?
Does the fact that Jesus is the unique Son of God and Savior of the world imply that all those outside of Christian revelation are completely misguided? One way of saying this is as follows: While in Christ we have infallible truth, outside of the Church are truths which can be instructive and of value. These truths arise from several facts.
1) Everyone in a universe that shouts the glory of God. The Psalmist said, “The heavens declare God’s glory.”
2) Everyone is made in God’s image (Gen 1:27) which gives them a certain conscience and knowledge of right and wrong. Every religions has something like a golden rule. Paul in Rom. 2 tells of those who do not know the actual law of Moses but who fulfill the law of God written on their hearts. Job was seen by the early church as a gentile who fulfilled God’s laws written on his heart and was blameless before God.
3) every heart hungers for God and for salvation.
4) In Methodism we talk about the prevenient grace of God which works in all persons drawing them to the truth of Christ. We not only know the laws by nature, we have a certain ability to understand and comply. Methodists have traditionally called this prevenient grace.
In other words, when we think about other religions, we do not think about people who have absolutely no access to divine Grace. Traditional theology tells us otherwise. Let me put this differently. CS Lewis in Mere Christianity says that when he was an atheist, he was forced by his worldview to be intolerant of all religions. They were all fundamentally false and misguided about the basic truth of reality. There is no god or gods or God or spirit or angels or forces or anything but matter. When he became a Christian he could take a more tolerant liberal view about other religions as well. While he might not agree with the understandings of Muslim about the nature of the deity and the questions of God’s incarnation in Christ, he could agree with the Muslim on many things. God exists, is personal, and demands humility and divine service. The same is true of all other religions. Becoming a Christian helped him take a more liberal view of other religions.
Bishop Lesslie Newbiggin was a bishop on South India for forty years and wrote extensively about world religions. He knew many persons who had converted to Christianity from other religions. He noted that they experienced both continuity and discontinuity. They had a clear sense that they had to serve Christ and Christ alone. Yet they also knew that it had been Jesus who was dealing with them all along in the pre-Christian searching.
Why the Diversity?
If this is the case, why so many different religions? People believe very different things about God; surely God could have made clear which is the right path. To some people, the sheer number of religious options shows that religion is a human invention. Yet, the fact that virtually all human beings have religions or spiritual quests of some sort point to the reality of God and the fact that God made us to long for him. The spiritual longings which are so ubiquitous is a fact itself that cries out for explanation and the best explanation for it is simple: God made us in his image and shaped us to live in relationship with Him.
The multiplicity of opinion is to be expected. Adam Hamilton points out that often, when he sees a movie with his wife, and discusses it later, he wonders if they saw the same movie! They both experienced it so differently and thought of such different meanings to the exact same film. Paul tells us, “We know only in part . . . For now we see in a mirror dimly” (I Cor 13:9, 12). God allows religious differences, in part the way a parent lets a child struggle to learn. If you are teaching your children how to spell, you don’t say, “pencil – now that is p, e, n, c, i, l.” They would never learn to spell. You have to let them struggle to learn. I think in all religions we see God allowing humans to struggle with the ultimate questions of life. God could simply open the heavens and say, “Look, you humans. Christ is my son and you all need to be saved by believing in him.” God could do that but chooses not to. He wants us to struggle, we who see in the mirror darkly. Religious diversity is part of that struggle.
We see this struggle right in the pages of the Bible. If you were in our OT class, it has been something of a theme of the class. You can see the development of ideas and thinking about God right in the pages of the Bible. You have to close your eyes not to see it. God choose Abraham to follow him, even thought Abraham was certainly not a full monotheist the way Isaiah was. Moses brought the laws of God on Mt. Sinai but is constantly updating the law for new situations as they arise. God gave the law – you would think it would be perfect from the start. But Moses has to go back to God and say, “What about this?” And God gives a more defined law (for example: Num 27:1-11 and 36:1-13). It happens over and over. Jesus adds new light to what was previously known about God.
How Should we View Other Religions?
Did you realize that only 1/3 of the world’s population have an affiliation to Christianity. Two thirds of the world’s population are not Christians. They long to know truth and seek to serve God and their fellow humans as they best understand. God formed these persons also from their mother’s womb as Ps 139 notes. So what about other religions: Will they be saved? Here are three perspectives.
The Pluralist Perspective claims that all religions are equally valid paths to the Ultimate Reality of the universe. All religions are at their core saying and believing and experiencing the same divine reality in the world. “Your truth is true for you if it is honestly held and internally consistent.”
This has problems for me for three reasons. First, it fails to be faithful to the uniqueness of Jesus we outlined above. If Jesus is the unique Son of God, that truth must trump all other truths and be of ultimate importance. Second, I don’t think this really honors other religions. If a Muslim hears a religious pluralist, he isn’t going to agree and say, “Yes, Islam is really teaching the same thing as Christianity.” A Hindu may come closer to agreeing but in the end he’ll want to say, “Yes, but Hinduism is not the same as your religion. We believe things that are fundamentally different.” While the pluralist wants to honor other religions, he fails to do so. Thirdly, different religions teach exactly the opposite things in many regards. The Muslim fundamentalist who believes that Mohammed was Allah’s prophet doesn’t have much in common with the Theravada Buddhist who doesn’t believe in a deity of any type at all. These religions cannot be boiled down to an essential unity.
The Exclusivist Perspective is at the other end of the spectrum. It states simply that those who do not believe in Jesus will all go to hell out of sheer necessity. It does not matter how devout they are or how closely they follow moral beliefs and lifestyles. They simply had not been given the opportunity to believe in Jesus who is the only way, the only truth, the only life (John 14:6 again). We will consider this passage again.
The Inclusivist Perspective says that Jesus is in fact the only basis of salvation – no one is saved other than through the work of Christ – but that one does not have to know Jesus during this life to be saved by Him. Salvation is available to those who profess other religions but by means of the hidden Christ. One who throws themselves upon God’s mercy in this life is essentially throwing themselves into the arms of Christ without knowing it. This person knows that they have done wrong and feel contrition about this wrong. They do not understand historically who Jesus was and what Jesus has done to solve the problem, but God judges them as if they did understand. God judges them on the basis of what they know.
The biblical text comes in Luke 18: the parable of the Pharisee and the publican. The publican or tax collector simply beat his chest and said, “God have mercy on me, a sinner.” He never believed in Jesus or knew about Jesus in Jesus own parable. But Jesus says that he went up from the temple justified before God that day. This is an important truth: the essential prayer of all those who repent is, “Lord, have mercy on me a sinner.” This prayer activates God’s saving grace which historically depends upon Jesus even when the person does not fully understand this. I must add that John Wesley was an inclusivist and on several occasions wrote about this.
The Last Battle
Adam Hamilton in his book of World Religions quotes CS Lewis’ The Last Battle. In this tale, Emeth (which means truth in Hebrew although I don’t know if Lewis intended this) meets Aslan in final judgment. Emeth had been a devoted worshipper of Tash – a different deity - his whole life. When he comes face to face with Aslan (who represents Jesus) he expects to be put to death. He realizes he’s been mistaken and worshipping the wrong deity. Here is his encounter with Aslan.
He touched my forehead . . . and said, “Son thou art welcome.” But I said, “Alas, Lord, I am no son of Thine but the servant of Tash.” He answered, “Child, all the service thou hast done to Tash I account as service done to me.” Then I asked, “Are Thou and Tash one?” The Lion growled so that the earth shook . . . and said, “It is false. Not because he and I are one but because he and I are opposites, I take to me the services which thou hast done to him. . . “ I said, “I have been seeking Tash all my days. . .” The Glorious one said, “Unless thy desire had been for me thou wouldst not have sought so long and so truly. For all find what they truly seek.”
Paul in Phil. 2:10 says “every knee will bend and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.” Those who didn’t know the Lordship of Christ in this life will, as Emeth did, when he encounter Jesus will realize that they were worshipping Christ implicitly all along. You may ask, “Then why should we obey the commission of Jesus to make Christian disciples of all nations?” We should tell them because Christ is indeed the way, the truth and the life; he gives us the most complete picture and relationship with God available. We offer Christ to provide assurance of salvation and simply because Jesus commanded us to do so.
Conclusion
My desire for you is that you will struggle with these questions. I’m not an expert but I’ve read and thought about these questions a lot. I’ve chosen to say, “I not only can learn about other religions respectfully, I can learn from then in ways that are helpful to my own faith walk. I can do that and be absolutely faithful to Jesus and to my Christian heritage.”
My hope is that you will be openhearted. Remember that we will also discover where other religions contradict Christian teachings and we will humbly reject them at that point. I hope that this will help you grow in your Christian walk and help us all develop the kinds of spiritual sensitivity that helps us be better witnesses to the resurrection power of Jesus Christ. We can only effectively bear witness to Christ if we have faithfully understood what other religions presently believe. I believe we set out on this pilgrimage out of a direct desire to be faithful to Jesus and to his calling to bear witness to his name.
Monday, August 3, 2009
I don't wannt be a Pharisee
This appeared in God's Politics, a blog associated with Sojourner's Magazine a few weeks back. It arose after working with students here at LU who seem to be addicted to describing the Pharisees in the most dark language - hypocrites who hated Jesus. While there is truly an offense to the Jews in the gospel (one which I am reluctant to soften), it seems to me Christians can work harder to appreciate those Pharisees. So here we are - 'I don't wanna be a Pharisee!'
In the fall of 1997, I began a graduate program in Bible at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, Ohio. One of the things that surprised me in studying the Bible with rabbinical students was the degree to which they perceived the New Testament to be fundamentally anti-Jewish. As an orthodox Christian, I found it troubling to hear the teachings of Jesus described as ‘anti-Jewish’ and as contributing factors to Jewish suffering. Jesus’ teachings in Matthew 23 – in which he calls the Pharisees hypocrites, blind-guides, children of hell and much more!– are felt more deeply by Jews than Christians sometimes realize. They know that the Pharisees were direct precursors to the rabbis who shaped the Mishnah which lies at the core of the Talmud.
This discomfort has been only accentuated in hearing Christian children sing silly camp-songs like, “I don’t want to be a Pharisee, ‘cuz they’re not fair, you see.” My daughter who is nine just asked me what I was writing about. When I said “the Pharisees” she responded in song, “I don’t want to be a Pharisee!” To my rabbinical student friends, this is the equivalent to saying, “I would never want to be a rabbi, because they are all a bunch of hypocrites.” A woman once asked me if Jews tire of having a religion made up only of rules and regulations. “It must be so tedious to be legalistic and not have the Holy Spirit.” It is out of these experiences that I wish to write to help Christians know how to think not only about what Jesus says about the Pharisees, but about how this relates to modern Judaism.
It is often said, and worth remembering, that Jesus criticized his contemporaries as an insider much as the prophets of old had done. The church which collected and cherished these teachings of Jesus did so as powerless underdogs. They could not have foreseen or imagined a triumphant Christianity which would later use such texts to justify acts of violence against Jewish neighbors as sometimes has occurred in the history of the Church. As one of my professors, Ellis Rivkin claimed, “The New Testament is not anti-Jewish because Jesus didn’t aim to destroy Israel but to purify it. It was later perverted by Christians who had meaner intentions.”
But more could be said. Was Jesus really right about the Pharisees? Were they hypocrites who didn’t practice what they preached (Matt 23:3)? Were they primarily concerned with spiritual showmanship but not spiritual authenticity (Matt 23:5-7)? Did they emphasize details of the law over the weightier issues like justice, mercy and faithfulness? Did they strain at gnats and swallow camels (23:23-24)? A quick answer might be, “many did, many didn’t.”
The most famous rabbinic text of all, often called Pirke Avot or “Ethics of the Fathers” illumines Jesus’ teachings. The Mishnah lies at the center of the Talmud, and Pirke Avot lies at the center of the Mishnah and is in many ways its ideological core. The fact that rabbinic teachers were called “Fathers” is evident from the title. The absolute reverence for the ‘Fathers’ which Jesus sought to overthrow (Matt 23:8-12) is evident in Pirke Avot where Jose ben Joezer says, “Let your house be a meeting house for the sages, and sit in (literally ‘roll in’) the dust of their feet, and drink in their words with thirst” (Avot 1:4). Jesus, as Matthew tells us, sought to create a new egalitarian community of equals. Jesus is the New Moses whose interpretation of the Law is definitive in a way the rabbinic unending legal discussion is not. He is the teacher. We call none else ‘Father.’
Even the famous Rabban Gamaliel seems to be the object of Jesus’ critique when Gamaliel says, “Do not accustom yourself to giving tithes by guesswork (Avot 1:16). A whole tractate of the Mishnah is devoted to spelling out in exquisite detail how one is to offer tithes. Another Tractate Damai is devoted to the question of giving tithes when there is some doubt as to its calculation. While the Mishnah didn’t take its final literary form for about 170 years after Jesus lifetime, the laws of the tithes clearly are in development when Jesus criticized the Pharisees for their anxieties about tithing herbs correctly (Matt 23:23-25).
The early progenitors of the rabbinic movement were known to have commanded a fence to be built around the Torah: “Build a fence around the Torah” (Avot 1:1). The concept here is quite simple: in order to achieve covenant holiness, and to attain the true blessing of the covenant (and ultimate freedom from exile), we must interpret the law so as to insure that we keep it in all its detail. For instance, if the law says, “Don’t drive over 65 mph,” we will legislate a 55 mph speed limit.” This is the secondary fence (rabbinic oral law) around the Torah (biblical written law). This theory which lies at the core of Rabbinic thought had a tendency to lead to endless legal wrangling about exactly what was required by the biblical law and what the rabbis should require to make certain the biblical laws were kept. The system also had a tendency to lead to casuistic special-pleading as Jesus points out in Matthew 23:16-22. For similar reasons, modern Reform Jews also de-emphasize the Talmudic law and seek social justice rather than legal purity.
The thing that many Christians do not see here is that while many of Jesus’ criticisms of the Pharisees were valid in their own right, it is a fact that many other rabbis of Jesus’ day were making similar points and were similarly concerned. Conflict within the rabbinic community between the Hillelites (a more lenient interpreter) and the Shammaites (a stricter interpreter) sometimes has Jesus sounding more like Hillelites and other times (notably on divorce) more like Shammai. It is common knowledge that Jesus sided with Pharisees against the Sadducees on the topic of the resurrection. Many Rabbis at this time were aware of the dangers of hypocrisy and special-pleading the legal system enabled. Other rabbis felt the dangers of the system and sought to ground it in core values and warn against hypocrisy. Finding warnings against hypocrisy such as the following in Pirke Avot are easy to find: “Do his will as if it were your will. Then He will do your will as if it were his will” (Avot 2:4).
It is well-known that Hillel, who lived just a generation before Jesus, once told a would-be convert to Judaism that the primary rule of Judaism was not to do anything to a neighbor (Heb. haber) that one would personally find hateful (Bavli Shab. 31a). The rest, he said, was so much commentary. Some Jews claim that this, in fact, is a higher more challenging moral standard than the positive version of the Golden Rule taught by Jesus since it makes the effect of your actions on others the regulating principle (see The Golden Rule in the Jewish Encyclopedia).
Some have thought that Hillel’s statement, in using Hebrew word haber for ‘friend’ restricts the command to fellow Jewish legal sages as the word sometimes means. But the context speaks otherwise; Hillel says these words to a would-be convert who could hardly qualify as a haber in the advanced sense. In Avot 1:12, Hillel encourages the broadest kind of human sympathy with the exhortation to love your fellow creatures and bring them to Torah. The language he uses here clearly embraces all humanity.
Again, the point here is that there were differences of opinion in Israel already about how crucial the details of legal observance were. Some rabbis already realized that the heart of their faith could be lost in the blizzard of legal opinion and sought to prevent this. Many rabbis were aware of the need to clarify what lies at the heart of the law and to prevent hypocrisy. In words that lie at the beginning of Avot and are sung, to this day in many synagogue services, we read, “On three things the world is sustained: on Torah, on Temple service, and on deeds of loving-kindness” (Avot 1:2). A clearer statement of the legal centrality of love could hardly be imagined.
In a strange way, the New Testament illustrates this Rabbinic interest to place love at the core of the law. In Matthew 22:34, Jesus is asked by a Pharisee which was the greatest commandment. That Jesus’ response was a fairly typical one in Judaism is illustrated in Luke by the story that leads up to the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-28). In this case, Jesus asks the legal expert how he understood the law’s basic requirements. The response given sounds almost exactly like the same the opinion Jesus gave in Matthew 22:34. What Jesus does with the following parable is somewhat unique: he makes absolutely explicit that ‘neighbor’ is to be understood radically inclusively; we are commanded not only to love fellow Jews but even Samaritans (thus the following parable). But what is unique is only the explicit inclusion of even Samaritans, not the general principle.
The point of all this is quite simple. While Jesus certainly had abuses in the practice of Pharisaic piety and hypocrisy to condemn, he was not alone. Other rabbis had similar criticisms of their fellows. As Christians often will notice, our faith also has a tendency to bring out the best and the worst in us. Modern believers can easily become hypocritical, legalistic and petty just as the Pharisees of Jesus’ condemnation. Jesus, in the best of his prophetic tradition, called Israel to a higher form of piety and covenant loyalty (Be ye perfect!). He was not alone. In many ways, Hillel would have agreed. Christians could do well to use the term “Pharisaical” more carefully We still casually use the term to mean “spiritually false” or “hypocritical.” Let’s be fair to these poor Pharisees, or we’re not being fair, you see?
In the fall of 1997, I began a graduate program in Bible at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, Ohio. One of the things that surprised me in studying the Bible with rabbinical students was the degree to which they perceived the New Testament to be fundamentally anti-Jewish. As an orthodox Christian, I found it troubling to hear the teachings of Jesus described as ‘anti-Jewish’ and as contributing factors to Jewish suffering. Jesus’ teachings in Matthew 23 – in which he calls the Pharisees hypocrites, blind-guides, children of hell and much more!– are felt more deeply by Jews than Christians sometimes realize. They know that the Pharisees were direct precursors to the rabbis who shaped the Mishnah which lies at the core of the Talmud.
This discomfort has been only accentuated in hearing Christian children sing silly camp-songs like, “I don’t want to be a Pharisee, ‘cuz they’re not fair, you see.” My daughter who is nine just asked me what I was writing about. When I said “the Pharisees” she responded in song, “I don’t want to be a Pharisee!” To my rabbinical student friends, this is the equivalent to saying, “I would never want to be a rabbi, because they are all a bunch of hypocrites.” A woman once asked me if Jews tire of having a religion made up only of rules and regulations. “It must be so tedious to be legalistic and not have the Holy Spirit.” It is out of these experiences that I wish to write to help Christians know how to think not only about what Jesus says about the Pharisees, but about how this relates to modern Judaism.
It is often said, and worth remembering, that Jesus criticized his contemporaries as an insider much as the prophets of old had done. The church which collected and cherished these teachings of Jesus did so as powerless underdogs. They could not have foreseen or imagined a triumphant Christianity which would later use such texts to justify acts of violence against Jewish neighbors as sometimes has occurred in the history of the Church. As one of my professors, Ellis Rivkin claimed, “The New Testament is not anti-Jewish because Jesus didn’t aim to destroy Israel but to purify it. It was later perverted by Christians who had meaner intentions.”
But more could be said. Was Jesus really right about the Pharisees? Were they hypocrites who didn’t practice what they preached (Matt 23:3)? Were they primarily concerned with spiritual showmanship but not spiritual authenticity (Matt 23:5-7)? Did they emphasize details of the law over the weightier issues like justice, mercy and faithfulness? Did they strain at gnats and swallow camels (23:23-24)? A quick answer might be, “many did, many didn’t.”
The most famous rabbinic text of all, often called Pirke Avot or “Ethics of the Fathers” illumines Jesus’ teachings. The Mishnah lies at the center of the Talmud, and Pirke Avot lies at the center of the Mishnah and is in many ways its ideological core. The fact that rabbinic teachers were called “Fathers” is evident from the title. The absolute reverence for the ‘Fathers’ which Jesus sought to overthrow (Matt 23:8-12) is evident in Pirke Avot where Jose ben Joezer says, “Let your house be a meeting house for the sages, and sit in (literally ‘roll in’) the dust of their feet, and drink in their words with thirst” (Avot 1:4). Jesus, as Matthew tells us, sought to create a new egalitarian community of equals. Jesus is the New Moses whose interpretation of the Law is definitive in a way the rabbinic unending legal discussion is not. He is the teacher. We call none else ‘Father.’
Even the famous Rabban Gamaliel seems to be the object of Jesus’ critique when Gamaliel says, “Do not accustom yourself to giving tithes by guesswork (Avot 1:16). A whole tractate of the Mishnah is devoted to spelling out in exquisite detail how one is to offer tithes. Another Tractate Damai is devoted to the question of giving tithes when there is some doubt as to its calculation. While the Mishnah didn’t take its final literary form for about 170 years after Jesus lifetime, the laws of the tithes clearly are in development when Jesus criticized the Pharisees for their anxieties about tithing herbs correctly (Matt 23:23-25).
The early progenitors of the rabbinic movement were known to have commanded a fence to be built around the Torah: “Build a fence around the Torah” (Avot 1:1). The concept here is quite simple: in order to achieve covenant holiness, and to attain the true blessing of the covenant (and ultimate freedom from exile), we must interpret the law so as to insure that we keep it in all its detail. For instance, if the law says, “Don’t drive over 65 mph,” we will legislate a 55 mph speed limit.” This is the secondary fence (rabbinic oral law) around the Torah (biblical written law). This theory which lies at the core of Rabbinic thought had a tendency to lead to endless legal wrangling about exactly what was required by the biblical law and what the rabbis should require to make certain the biblical laws were kept. The system also had a tendency to lead to casuistic special-pleading as Jesus points out in Matthew 23:16-22. For similar reasons, modern Reform Jews also de-emphasize the Talmudic law and seek social justice rather than legal purity.
The thing that many Christians do not see here is that while many of Jesus’ criticisms of the Pharisees were valid in their own right, it is a fact that many other rabbis of Jesus’ day were making similar points and were similarly concerned. Conflict within the rabbinic community between the Hillelites (a more lenient interpreter) and the Shammaites (a stricter interpreter) sometimes has Jesus sounding more like Hillelites and other times (notably on divorce) more like Shammai. It is common knowledge that Jesus sided with Pharisees against the Sadducees on the topic of the resurrection. Many Rabbis at this time were aware of the dangers of hypocrisy and special-pleading the legal system enabled. Other rabbis felt the dangers of the system and sought to ground it in core values and warn against hypocrisy. Finding warnings against hypocrisy such as the following in Pirke Avot are easy to find: “Do his will as if it were your will. Then He will do your will as if it were his will” (Avot 2:4).
It is well-known that Hillel, who lived just a generation before Jesus, once told a would-be convert to Judaism that the primary rule of Judaism was not to do anything to a neighbor (Heb. haber) that one would personally find hateful (Bavli Shab. 31a). The rest, he said, was so much commentary. Some Jews claim that this, in fact, is a higher more challenging moral standard than the positive version of the Golden Rule taught by Jesus since it makes the effect of your actions on others the regulating principle (see The Golden Rule in the Jewish Encyclopedia).
Some have thought that Hillel’s statement, in using Hebrew word haber for ‘friend’ restricts the command to fellow Jewish legal sages as the word sometimes means. But the context speaks otherwise; Hillel says these words to a would-be convert who could hardly qualify as a haber in the advanced sense. In Avot 1:12, Hillel encourages the broadest kind of human sympathy with the exhortation to love your fellow creatures and bring them to Torah. The language he uses here clearly embraces all humanity.
Again, the point here is that there were differences of opinion in Israel already about how crucial the details of legal observance were. Some rabbis already realized that the heart of their faith could be lost in the blizzard of legal opinion and sought to prevent this. Many rabbis were aware of the need to clarify what lies at the heart of the law and to prevent hypocrisy. In words that lie at the beginning of Avot and are sung, to this day in many synagogue services, we read, “On three things the world is sustained: on Torah, on Temple service, and on deeds of loving-kindness” (Avot 1:2). A clearer statement of the legal centrality of love could hardly be imagined.
In a strange way, the New Testament illustrates this Rabbinic interest to place love at the core of the law. In Matthew 22:34, Jesus is asked by a Pharisee which was the greatest commandment. That Jesus’ response was a fairly typical one in Judaism is illustrated in Luke by the story that leads up to the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-28). In this case, Jesus asks the legal expert how he understood the law’s basic requirements. The response given sounds almost exactly like the same the opinion Jesus gave in Matthew 22:34. What Jesus does with the following parable is somewhat unique: he makes absolutely explicit that ‘neighbor’ is to be understood radically inclusively; we are commanded not only to love fellow Jews but even Samaritans (thus the following parable). But what is unique is only the explicit inclusion of even Samaritans, not the general principle.
The point of all this is quite simple. While Jesus certainly had abuses in the practice of Pharisaic piety and hypocrisy to condemn, he was not alone. Other rabbis had similar criticisms of their fellows. As Christians often will notice, our faith also has a tendency to bring out the best and the worst in us. Modern believers can easily become hypocritical, legalistic and petty just as the Pharisees of Jesus’ condemnation. Jesus, in the best of his prophetic tradition, called Israel to a higher form of piety and covenant loyalty (Be ye perfect!). He was not alone. In many ways, Hillel would have agreed. Christians could do well to use the term “Pharisaical” more carefully We still casually use the term to mean “spiritually false” or “hypocritical.” Let’s be fair to these poor Pharisees, or we’re not being fair, you see?
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