Category Archives: Faith and Doubt

Update on the Human Condition

Two quotes today that sum up my current philosophy of life. The first is from Catholic blogger Cacciaguida‘s review of “Breach“, the new movie about FBI agent/Russian spy Robert Hanssen:


The world is not in fact divided between the pure and the impure (or take any other matched set of a virtue and its corresponding vice): it’s made up of impure people who acknowledge the obligations of purity and try to meet them, and impure people who don’t.
The second comes from the blog of award-winning poet and fiction writer Sally Bellerose, talking about what she’s learned from her experience of chronic illness (her own ulcerative colitis and her father’s dementia):


People need to feel safe.  I sure do. Who wants to be reminded that we are soft-skinned vulnerable creatures? For security sake we need to feel in control of our environment and our selves. All kinds of conditions threaten that control. What could be more basic than the need to feel safe in our bodies? That we are born dependent can’t be denied, but a few years after birth, control of bodily function is a given for most people. Disease, disability, any condition that takes away that baseline of corporal control is a kind of body betrayal to the person affected and an unsolicited reminder to the well and the unwell that humans are vulnerable and that (forgive the very bad pun) ‘shit happens’. But things do go wrong. All bodies refuse to work as desired at some time or other. As humans, we don’t want to be confronted with the fact that no amount of research, medical break-through, or new technology is going to keep our bodies from eventually breaking down.

We are at risk, some more than others, but not just four year-olds getting spanked for a situation beyond her control, or old folks with a confirmed diagnosis, all of us, at one time or another. Most people are not happy to be reminded of their own frailty. I think most chronic illness, but especially conditions like UC, which exposes the messiness of life, scare people because they are forced to consider their own tenuous bodies. People who are well want to believe that disease happens to other people, other people who have somehow lost control, older people or people with less access to care, people unlike themselves.

But it’s not just UC that people fear. My real life dad has Alzheimer’s. I write, sometimes, about a demented dad. People often ask, “How do you feel about exposing your father in print?” They mean, “How could you possibly disrespect your dad by portraying his dementia?” For expedience and self protection I lean on the, “I write fiction,” answer. I really “feel” that dad suffers from an extreme of a universal condition. All people in the real and imagined world are a bit doddering. Our minds, like our bodies, just don’t always do what we want them to do. This is not news to anyone with an iota of self awareness. No one escapes this human condition. If you think you are never weak-minded, you are, at the least, in jeopardy of being a bore.

Say you won a Pulitzer in Literature at 30, and died in a car crash at 32; some part of you died mentally frail. You may have been successful at keeping your fragility from your editors, publishers, and readers, but something in you was teetering and foolish. Like failures of our GI tracts, whether in a big way as happens with UC or in a more contained and only occasional way, as happens with an intestinal virus, all our systems fail all of us, in greater and lesser ways.
It’s to Sally’s credit that she can make this sound like good news. Which, in a strange sort of way, it is.

Amherst’s Episcopal Church Declares Wedding Moratorium


Grace Episcopal Church in Amherst, MA has come up with a creative way to affirm GLBT rights without defying the denomination’s ban on same-sex marriage rites. From today’s Daily Hampshire Gazette (subscription required):


Declaring a “holy fast,” Grace Episcopal Church has decided to stop performing all wedding ceremonies because its bishops bar the blessing of same-sex unions.

“We are called to join the fast that our homosexual brothers and sisters in Christ have had to observe all their lives,” said the church’s rector, the Rev. Robert Hirschfeld, in his sermon Sunday.

The worldwide Anglican Communion, of which the Episcopal Church is a part, has been splitting apart over this issue and the election of a gay bishop. Hirschfeld said that he knows of no other church that has taken the step of abstaining from all weddings.

“Gays and lesbians are the church, as much, if not more, as I am a straight white man,” he said in his sermon. “But this sacrament, and the grace it is meant to convey, is not available to them.”

The reaction of members of the congregation was largely positive at discussions with Hirschfeld after Sunday’s two services. Some members expressed concern that the move might be polarizing,  while others said they regretted that people who grew up in the church can’t get married there….

Hirschfeld said he was asked at the deathbed of Victoria White, a Northampton lesbian who died recently, if it would be all right to have her funeral at Grace Church. “The question had poignancy for me,” he said. “We are here for all people.”

Gay and lesbian couples “always feel their relationship is less than holy” when they are denied the right to marry, he said.

“I can no longer hold together my own integrity as a priest who has made vows to minister faithfully the sacraments of the reconciling love of Christ, if indeed to perform such sacrament means deeper, more wrenching, more agonizing tearing of the body of Christ which I am called to support and nourish,” Hirschfeld said in his sermon….

“I invite us to join in solidarity, no a better word is in communion, with those persons who have been fasting and walking in the desert their whole lives, not by choice, but because the church has forced them to,” Hirschfeld said.

Grace Episcopal’s solution strikes me as an especially Christian, nonviolent way to take a stand. Leadership through sacrifice, rather than through defiance of authority, is a powerful and peaceful witness. Hirschfeld’s entire sermon is online here.

Saving Jesus (Episode 7): Thy Kingdom Come


The most recent installment of Saving Jesus, which was about the “kingdom of God,” opened my eyes to the political dimension of the Lord’s Prayer. We say, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done,” and then ask God to meet our personal needs for food, shelter, and physical and spiritual security. I’d always pictured the two halves of the prayer interacting thus: We ask God for those protections, but ultimately accept whatever He sends us —
His will, not ours. And yet we still ask, because we are humble enough to admit that we’re still mortal men and women who need to worry about these survival basics, not angels who can spend all their time (do angels have time?) praising God.

On last week’s DVD, retired bishop John Shelby Spong suggested an additional reading. This prayer was important to the early church, facing persecution and trying to cling to its commitment to nonviolence. Those Christians would have prayed that they’d have what they needed to survive from day to day, and not falter, till they brought about the kingdom, till God’s will was done on earth as it was in heaven.

This reminded me of something the pastor at the evangelical church said in a recent sermon. (I’m not ready to call it my evangelical church, but they’re starting to grow on me….) Forgiveness, he said, is how God sweeps flat the obstacles in our soul so that the winds of the Holy Spirit can blow freely through us. Without detracting from the utter gratuitousness of the gift, it’s comforting to think that God gets something out of the deal as well. We’re set free from sin so that we can be what God wanted us to be, not just for ourselves but for the benefit of the whole world. What God does for me, He does in some sense for everybody’s sake.

Also on the DVD, theologian John Dominic Crossan further demonstrated how the language we use to describe Jesus was a direct political rebuke, really a satire, of the divine titles that Caesar Augustus claimed. To a first-century hearer, “Jesus is God” would have meant that the God I believe in looks like Jesus, not Caesar. He’s a God who brings about peace by doing justice, not through violent conquest. According to Crossan, “Was Jesus divine or not” is a phony question. The real question was “Is Jesus God or is Caesar God?” In other words, which side are you on?

While I actually think the Incarnation is deeply important to our understanding of salvation, I welcome Crossan’s additional gloss on the topic. The strength of this DVD series is its restoration of the historical and political meanings of the gospel; I only wish they didn’t feel the need to play those meanings off against traditional theological and personal ones in an either-or kind of way. N.T. Wright does a much better job integrating the two. Still, half a loaf, etc.

Crossan’s summary of Jesus’ proclamation of the kingdom is as follows: God has inaugurated a new era, but we are called to actualize His promises in how we treat each other. It can’t happen without God, but it also can’t happen without us. As a solution to those endless “faith vs. works, free will vs. sovereignty” debates, I like this just fine.

Church Search Advice from Michael Novak

A friend who’s been following my endless vacillation over my relationship to my church sent me the following quote from Tell Me Why by Michael and Jana Novak (Pocket Books, 1998). The book is structured as a dialogue between a Catholic theologian and his twentysomething daughter about the basics of the Christian faith. Here, he talks about finding the church and denomination that are appropriate for your spiritual journey:


Judaism and Christianity (and some other religions) are about truth and holiness. In this context holiness means to love the lord your God with your whole heart, your whole mind, and your whole soul and to love your neighbor as you would be loved. The motive of such love is awe for the love that the Creator has poured out upon you.

Therefore, choose the communion that is most likely to oblige you and nudge you to be faithful to truth — to inquiry, insight, and the hunger for evidence and sound argument — and to become holy. Resist the temptation to join the communion that offers you only comfort, sociality, and nice company. (Look for that in a good club.) Resist also the appeal of aesthetic pleasures at the services — music, poetry, visual stunningness (whether splendid or spare).”

[Here a brief footnote goes into the relationship of beauty and truth, with Novak concluding that “To rest in beauty rather than in truth is to sow seed in thin soil. That said, I concur that beauty is a sign of truth.”] (pp.159-60)

To Novak’s sound advice I would only add the caveat that novice Christians should not berate themselves too much for caring about aesthetics, sociality and the rest. It may be too early to tell what insights and arguments you really need to hear. If the music speaks to you of a God whom your mind still can’t accept, if the companionship of other believers helps you begin to think this God may be real, then go with it. Someday in the future, if you’re starting to love Jesus like a real person but your church is stuck in social club/concert hall mode, you may find it’s time to move on, but be grateful to the folks who took you as far as they could.

I sometimes forget how very recent my faith commitments are, and how only a couple of years ago I was passionately skeptical about some of the same doctrines that I now can’t live without. A reason to hold those commitments more lightly? I don’t think so. Just a reason to be charitable. To care about whatever I believe, but not to be proud of myself for believing or doubting — that’s the goal.

Walter Wink: “Homosexuality and the Bible”

Distinguished theologian Walter Wink is a professor emeritus of Biblical interpretation at Auburn Theological Seminary in New York City. His books include The Powers That Be, a discussion of Christian nonviolence and social justice. (Unfortunately, he also thinks Jesus was only human, but then, so is Walter.) In this article from the Soulforce website, he offers a provocative critique of the Biblical case against homosexuality (boldface emphases are mine):


Paul’s unambiguous condemnation of homosexual behavior in Rom. 1:26-27 must be the centerpiece of any discussion.


For this reason God gave them up to degrading passions. Their women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, and in the same way also the men, giving up natural intercourse with women, were consumed with passion for one another. Men committed shameless acts with men and received in their own persons the due penalty for their error.


No doubt Paul was unaware of the distinction between sexual orientation, over which one has apparently very little choice, and sexual behavior, over which one does. He seemed to assume that those whom he condemned were heterosexuals who were acting contrary to nature, “leaving,” “giving up,” or “exchanging” their regular sexual orientation for that which was foreign to them. Paul knew nothing of the modern psychosexual understanding of homosexuals as persons whose orientation is fixed early in life, or perhaps even genetically in some cases. For such persons, having heterosexual relations would be acting contrary to nature, “leaving,” “giving up” or “exchanging” their natural sexual orientation for one that was unnatural to them.


In other words, Paul really thought that those whose behavior he condemned were “straight,” and that they were behaving in ways that were unnatural to them. Paul believed that everyone was straight. He had no concept of homosexual orientation. The idea was not available in his world. There are people that are genuinely homosexual by nature (whether genetically or as a result of upbringing no one really knows, and it is irrelevant). For such a person it would be acting contrary to nature to have sexual relations with a person of the opposite sex.


Likewise, the relationships Paul describes are heavy with lust; they are not relationships between consenting adults who are committed to each other as faithfully and with as much integrity as any heterosexual couple. That was something Paul simply could not envision. Some people assume today that venereal disease and AIDS are divine punishment for homosexual behavior; we know it as a risk involved in promiscuity of every stripe, homosexual and heterosexual. In fact, the vast majority of people with AIDS the world around are heterosexuals. We can scarcely label AIDS a divine punishment, since nonpromiscuous lesbians are at almost no risk.


And Paul believes that homosexual behavior is contrary to nature, whereas we have learned that it is manifested by a wide variety of species, especially (but not solely) under the pressure of overpopulation. It would appear then to be a quite natural mechanism for preserving species. We cannot, of course, decide human ethical conduct solely on the basis of animal behavior or the human sciences, but Paul here is arguing from nature, as he himself says, and new knowledge of what is “natural” is therefore relevant to the case….

Clearly we regard certain rules, especially in the Old Testament, as no longer binding. Other things we regard as binding, including legislation in the Old Testament that is not mentioned at all in the New. What is our principle of selection here?

For example, virtually all modern readers would agree with the Bible in rejecting: incest, rape, adultery, and intercourse with animals. But we disagree with the Bible on most other sexual mores. The Bible condemned the following behaviors which we generally allow: intercourse during menstruation, celibacy, exogamy (marriage with non-Jews), naming sexual organs, nudity (under certain conditions), masturbation (some Christians still condemn this), birth control (some Christians still forbid this).


And the Bible regarded semen and menstrual blood as unclean, which most of us do not. Likewise, the Bible permitted behaviors that we today condemn: prostitution, polygamy, levirate marriage, sex with slaves, concubinage, treatment of women as property, and very early marriage (for the girl, age 11-13).


And while the Old Testament accepted divorce, Jesus forbade it. In short, of the sexual mores mentioned here, we only agree with the Bible on four of them, and disagree with it on sixteen!


Surely no one today would recommend reviving the levirate marriage. So why do we appeal to proof texts in Scripture in the case of homosexuality alone, when we feel perfectly free to disagree with Scripture regarding most other sexual practices? Obviously many of our choices in these matters are arbitrary. Mormon polygamy was outlawed in this country, despite the constitutional protection of freedom of religion, because it violated the sensibilities of the dominant Christian culture. Yet no explicit biblical prohibition against polygamy exists.


If we insist on placing ourselves under the old law, as Paul reminds us, we are obligated to keep every commandment of the law (Gal. 5:3). But if Christ is the end of the law (Rom. 10:4), if we have been discharged from the law to serve, not under the old written code but in the new life of the Spirit (Rom. 7:6), then all of these biblical sexual mores come under the authority of the Spirit. We cannot then take even what Paul himself says as a new Law. Christians reserve the right to pick and choose which sexual mores they will observe, though they seldom admit to doing just that. And this is as true of evangelicals and fundamentalists as it is of liberals and mainliners.


The crux of the matter, it seems to me, is simply that the Bible has no sexual ethic. There is no Biblical sex ethic. Instead, it exhibits a variety of sexual mores, some of which changed over the thousand year span of biblical history. Mores are unreflective customs accepted by a given community. Many of the practices that the Bible prohibits, we allow, and many that it allows, we prohibit. The Bible knows only a love ethic, which is constantly being brought to bear on whatever sexual mores are dominant in any given country, or culture, or period.


The very notion of a “sex ethic” reflects the materialism and splitness of modern life, in which we increasingly define our identity sexually. Sexuality cannot be separated off from the rest of life. No sex act is “ethical” in and of itself, without reference to the rest of a person’s life, the patterns of the culture, the special circumstances faced, and the will of God. What we have are simply sexual mores, which change, sometimes with startling rapidity, creating bewildering dilemmas. Just within one lifetime we have witnessed the shift from the ideal of preserving one’s virginity until marriage, to couples living together for several years before getting married. The response of many Christians is merely to long for the hypocrisies of an earlier era.


I agree that rules and norms are necessary; that is what sexual mores are. But rules and norms also tend to be impressed into the service of the Domination System, and to serve as a form of crowd control rather than to enhance the fullness of human potential. So we must critique the sexual mores of any given time and clime by the love ethic exemplified by Jesus. Defining such a love ethic is not complicated. It is non-exploitative (hence no sexual exploitation of children, no using of another to their loss), it does not dominate (hence no patriarchal treatment of women as chattel), it is responsible, mutual, caring, and loving. Augustine already dealt with this in his inspired phrase, “Love God, and do as you please.”


Our moral task, then, is to apply Jesus’ love ethic to whatever sexual mores are prevalent in a given culture. This doesn’t mean everything goes. It means that everything is to be critiqued by Jesus’ love commandment. We might address younger teens, not with laws and commandments whose violation is a sin, but rather with the sad experiences of so many of our own children who find too much early sexual intimacy overwhelming, and who react by voluntary celibacy and even the refusal to date. We can offer reasons, not empty and unenforceable orders. We can challenge both gays and straights to question their behaviors in the light of love and the requirements of fidelity, honesty, responsibility, and genuine concern for the best interests of the other and of society as a whole.


Christian morality, after all, is not a iron chastity belt for repressing urges, but a way of expressing the integrity of our relationship with God. It is the attempt to discover a manner of living that is consistent with who God created us to be. For those of same-sex orientation, as for heterosexuals, being moral means rejecting sexual mores that violate their own integrity and that of others, and attempting to discover what it would mean to live by the love ethic of Jesus.


Read the whole article here.

Shower of Stoles Exhibit Affirms GLBT Christians


Now through March 14, Smith College in Northampton, Mass. is hosting the Shower of Stoles Project, an exhibit of liturgical stoles and other sacred items from gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender church leaders from 26 denominations in six countries. These beautiful one-of-a-kind vestments are accompanied by personal stories of the wearers’ quest to share their spiritual gifts with a congregation that also accepts their sexual orientation. There are also “signature stoles” covered with messages of support from straight allies. 

The exhibit will resonate with anyone who has ever loved a church community yet felt pressure to hide one’s difference from them, whether that difference is ethnic, sexual, theological, class-based, or a matter of personality. This Robert Frost poem, which was displayed with the exhibit at Smith, spoke to my own continuing sadness about not finding a church that loves gay people and preaches the gospel:


Desert Places

Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast
In a field I looked into going past,
And the ground almost covered smooth in snow,
But a few weeds and stubble showing last.

The woods around it have it–it is theirs.
All animals are smothered in their lairs.
I am too absent-spirited to count;
The loneliness includes me unawares.

And lonely as it is that loneliness
Will be more lonely ere it will be less–
A blanker whiteness of benighted snow
With no expression, nothing to express.

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars–on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.

(I find it amusing in a sick way that the banner ads accompanying this poem online are for “Funeral Ringtones” and “The Soulmate Calculator”.)

Everything That Glitters


When criticizing certain sins and excesses (particularly the ones we’re not tempted to commit ourselves), we frequently fail to ask the question, “What is the good thing that this person is seeking in the wrong way?” As a result, the listeners feel condemned, and we feel frustrated at their refusal to want what’s best for them. This article on the Golden Calf from the Chabad-Lubavitch website shows a more compassionate and effective way to frame the question:



How did G-d address the gold-sickness of His newly chosen people? He didn’t abolish gold. He didn’t even take away theirs. He told them to use their gold to build Him a Sanctuary.


Compulsive overeating is a horrible disease: it’s unhealthy, it can even kill you. But the urge to eat is not only healthy — it’s vital to life itself.


The same is true of every negative phenomenon. There is nothing intrinsically bad in G-d’s world: every evil is a perverted good, every psychosis a healthy instinct gone awry.


So before we get all riled up over that woman with the two secretaries, let us try to understand the tendency of humans to splurge, flaunt and luxuriate in their wealth. We understand why we need food; we understand why we need shelter; but why do we crave gold?


In essence, the craving for gold is a yearning for transcendence. It is man saying: I am not content to merely exist and subsist; I want to exalt in life, I want to touch its magnificence and sublimity….

The answer, however, is not to squelch these strivings, but to purge them of their negative expressions. Use your yearning for gold to make a home for G-d.

On a more contemporary note, I love the country song “Everything That Glitters” by Dan Seals, a man’s bittersweet ode to the woman who has left him to raise their daughter while she rides the rodeo. He feels she’s given up something more valuable for something of lesser worth, and yet he also sees the beauty and daring with which she pursues her dream. It’s a song about how to understand and forgive sins without excusing them, and to hope that someday the other will come to love what you love. (The lyrics convey some of this, but for the full effect, you need to hear the tender way he sings it.)

Saving Jesus (Episode 6): 99.44% Pure


After an Ash Wednesday hiatus, the Saving Jesus class resumed at my former church this week, with one of the participants as leader because the minister was out of town. In his absence, amazingly, several people revealed a deep understanding of and attachment to the Incarnation and salvation by grace. It made me hopeful that this church could once again be on fire for Christ if it had the right leadership. “Shall these bones live?”

The video presentation about Jesus’ teachings focused on several instances where he reversed his culture’s usual understanding of purity: the famous parable of the Good Samaritan, and two brief sayings from Matthew 13:31-33:


He told them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, which a man took and planted in his field. Though it is the smallest of all your seeds, yet when it grows, it is the largest of garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and perch in its branches.”

He told them still another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed into a large amount of flour until it worked all through the dough.”
According to the video, the mustard plant was a weed that could take over the garden. Yeast was considered impure or unclean in Jewish culture. How is God like the mustard plant? Maybe you don’t want Him in your life, because His presence can get out of control. Maybe He’s hiding in something or someone you think of as beneath you. When your openness to discovering God outweighs your attachment to fixed ideas about pure/impure, high/low, you are getting a glimpse of the kingdom of heaven.

With the leaven, Jesus gives us a powerful metaphor for the Incarnation. God is not tainted by commingling with impurity. In fact, He becomes the impure substance (takes on human flesh) and dies, is consumed, is merged into a new thing, the bread of life.

In the story of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37), the priest and the Levite don’t pass by the nearly-dead man because they’re hypocrites. They are simply observing the purity laws that would make them unfit to perform their duties if they touched a corpse. Because the Samaritan belongs to a despised group of apostate Jews who accepted the Torah but not the rest of the Old Testament or the rabbinic laws, this ironically gives him the opportunity to help where others failed.

One of the class participants pointed out that Jesus actually never says that the Law, or the concept of purity (ritual or ethical), is BAD. This is in contrast to the simplistic antinomianism of the theologians on the video, who mainly see Jesus as a revolutionary leader in a world comprised of guilty oppressors and innocent victims. No less than the Levites’ purity codes, this utopian liberalism helps us avoid facing the universality of sin. As the old joke says, there are two kinds of people in this world: the ones who think there are two kinds of people in this world and the ones who don’t.

As the discussion progressed, the class concluded that Jesus spoke in parables and aphorisms because he wanted to frustrate our habits of dualistic thinking. Wisdom involves balancing competing principles in a way that takes account of the individual situation, whereas we love to pick our favorite rule and apply it mechanically to every case. Wisdom begins with actually seeing the other person, instead of first seeing our own ideas about him. Of course, when we rely on our own observations, we must face our responsibility for our mistaken judgments (no more hiding behind the rules), which makes us aware of our need for grace.

That’s the gospel, boys and girls! Enjoy it.

Richard Rohr: Reflections on Marriage and Celibacy

Richard Rohr, a Franciscan priest who founded the Center for Action and Contemplation in New Mexico, wrote an article for Sojourners magazine back in May 1979 (not available online, alas) called “Reflections on Marriage and Celibacy” which I had to quote here for several reasons. First, because I’ve been frustrated by how some Christian conservatives idealize the nuclear family, particularly the woman’s self-sacrificing role therein, as if codependence were not a form of idolatry just as dangerous as cold-hearted careerism. Second, because the last line quoted here (boldfacing is mine) beautifully expresses how my relationship with God is so precariously balanced between adoration and terror.


For Jesus, the kingdom is the possibility of universal compassion: it is community and not just kindly coupling. Marriage is a school, a sacrament, and a promise of the coming kingdom, but not itself the final stage. Jesus dethrones married love in order to enthrone it in proper perspective. The specific love points to the universal, but only the “love that moves the sun, the moon, and the other stars” can finally protect and make possible the specific love of a man and a woman.

Jesus seems to be concerned about widening the family circle to include all the life that God is offering. He knows how paralyzing and even deadening the familial relationships can be when they have cut their lifelines from the larger truth and more universal love. Family can be both life and death. Church also can be both life and death. Church and blood family both have the greatest power to wound and the greatest power to heal.

The gospel believes in family, but it is never going to limit itself to the blood relationships and call that alone family: “Anyone who prefers father or mother to me is not worthy of me. Anyone who prefers son or daughter to me is not worthy of me.” Good American Christian religion would never dare to say those words on its own. When we do, we recite them falteringly, because we cannot really understand the radical nature of Jesus’ vision….

If the community model of church has seldom taken hold, it can probably be attributed to many causes: individualism, authoritarianism, clericalism, fear, plus an overly intellectualized communication of the gospel. But the cause that I would like to deal with here is a certain kind of apathy (a pathos: no feeling), a fear of passion, which has consistently and ironically kept our incarnational faith from dealing with relationships, sexuality, emotions, bodiliness, and the power of love in general.

I am hard put to find a single century in our 2,000-year history since the Word became flesh in which there has been consistent and positive church teaching on the sexuality of this enfleshed creation. We have run from it, denied it, camouflaged it, sublimated it, died to it, sacramentalized it (thank God!) — but we have only in rare and mature instances really faced it, integrated it, and allowed it to raise us to God. We are afraid of the Word become flesh, we are afraid of heaven much more than we are afraid of hell. We live in an endless fear of the passion of God, who feels fiercely.

Blogging the Bible at Slate


Slate columnist David Plotz has been taking a lively tour through the Old Testament at Blogging the Bible, a series that combines chapter-by-chapter plot summaries with humor and contemporary cultural references. The column’s subtitle, “What happens when an ignoramus reads the good book?”, captures the essence of the project: reading the stories with fresh eyes, unencumbered by a religious (or anti-religious) agenda or the stiff piety that shies away from the Bible’s earthiness and flat-out weirdness. As Plotz said in an interview with Christianity Today:



The danger is that if you sound too casual, then people might think you’re not taking the Bible seriously. But it would be a lie for me to write in portentous language. If I were using high liturgical language or high rabbinical language, that wouldn’t be me.


Also, the Bible is often taught like that—in a formal way with moral lessons attached—but you miss the fact that this is an incredibly bawdy, hilarious, fun—hellacious, even—text. There’s a lot of sarcasm and wordplay and glee and craziness. Sometimes, I think to myself, I can never be as crude as the stuff in Judges. Or, I can never be as sarcastic as Elijah.


So, no, I don’t think I’m being too flip. The Bible is flip all the time….


There’s a notion that the Bible is pure and holy and full of family values. Thous, thees, shalls, shants—that’s all there. But what’s also there is human behavior at its most base level. Behaviors that are weird and gleeful and strange.


The writing is like that, too. There’s no stiffness to it. It’s loose and playful. So I feel like the blog should be like that, too. Obviously, I’m making allowances for my own writing, but I think there’s license to do that. You misunderstand the book if you think the only way to write about it is in an awed, distant, timid way. It’s a book that demands appreciation for all its liveliness.