on theology which rejects violence and domination

[sophiaserpentia]

A friend who was raised by extremely abusive Christian parents told me once of the theory she developed while coming to awareness of the depth of the mistreatment she had received, of Christianity as a religion based on child abuse. It starts with Abraham and Isaac, she said, before she pointed out that there many rules given in the Bible allowing or even commanding physical punishment of children. Finally, she said, you have God the Father punishing his own son for misdeeds he did not commit. In fact, the more Jesus suffered, the better for us.

I wasn't really sure what to think of this. But it was one of many thoughts that prodded me to think about power dynamics in the Bible. The Bible was, after all, written by and for men of prominence and power; it is reasonable to inquire into whether it promotes a social scheme which preserves their power and prestige. Who, after all, does not consciously or unconsciously give preference to ideologies that leave one better off?

Even having been exposed to the idea before, i was still astonished to see an idea very much like this promoted by a Bishop of the Episcopal Church. This is more or less the reasoning John Shelby Spong gives in his chapters in The Sins of Scripture on Christianity and corporal punishment: God is a parent who demands obedience under threat of violence and who acted this violence out on his own son. The only remaining major proponents of corporal punishment in America cite Christian doctrine, and many conservative preachers (including virtually all of the televangelists) speak approvingly of physical punishment they received regularly as children.

Spong finds within Christianity a strand of thought promoting violence, and its subtler forms guilt and shame, as acceptable for maintaining structures of dominance. He touches on dystheism (the idea that God is wrathful and will punish us if we do not appease him) as a theology that Christians adopted not just in response to their persecution in the early centuries or disasters like the Bubonic Plague, but also in response to the widespread approval of the physical punishment of children, and adults considered to be childlike such as slaves or women.

He pulls on this thread and finds that the central themes and myths of Christianity itself unravel when we reject violence. He even refers to Christianity as fundamentally sadomasochistic. His solution is a radical re-invisioning of Christology and Christian belief, which he says must change or die.

The deconstruction begins with the dismissal of [the story of Adam and Eve]. It has already moved from being thought of as literal history to being viewed as interpretive myth. The next step is to dismiss it as not even an accurate interpreter of life. There never was a time, either literally or metaphorically, when there was a perfect and finished creation. That biblical idea is simply wrong. It is not even symbolically valid.

... Since there was no perfect beginning... there can also be no fall into sin and thus no act of disobedience that destroyed the perfection of God's world. These details cannot be true even as symbols.

... There is a vast contrast between the definition of being fallen creatures and that of being incomplete creatures. Our humanity is not flawed by some real or mythical act of disobedience... it is rather distorted by the unfinished nature of our humanity.

... [Our critical examination of this issue] is like an unstoppable waterfall. Baptism, understood as the sacramental act designed to wash from the newborn baby the stain of that original fall into sin, becomes inoperative. The Eucharist, developed as a liturgical attempt to reenact the sacrifice that Jesus made on the cross that paid the price for our sinfulness, becomes empty of meaning. Various disciplinary tactics, from not sparing the rod with our children to the use of shame, guilt and fear to control the behavior of 'childlike' adults, become violations of life based on an inadequate knowledge of the nature of our humanity. They are the application of the wrong therapy designed to overcome a faulty diagnosis. Even the afterlife symbols of heaven and hell, designed to motivate behavior by promising either eternal reward or eternal punishment, now lose their credibility. A system of rewards and punishments, either in this life or beyond it, does not produce wholeness, nor does it issue in loving acts of a self-giving person. It produces rather a self-centered attempt at survival. It leads to behavior designed not to do good for good's sake, but to do good in order to win favor or to avoid punishment.

The Sins of Scripture pp. 176-178

It is hard to overstate the gravity of what he is saying here. His meaning is this: humans cannot possibly be born into a state of original sin. He states the implication of that explicitly: Jesus did not die for your sins.

Of course, any of us non-Christians could'a told ya that... but to see someone so deeply embedded in the edifice of the church admit that this is evident gives me hope that change is possible.

Comments

[alobar.livejournal.com]

Aw, you locked your post. I was going to pass the link on to a preacher I know.

[sophiaserpentia.livejournal.com]

Yeah, i've started locking some of my posts, for various reasons. You can still pass him the text of this if you want.

[alobar.livejournal.com]

Thanks.

[fizzyland.livejournal.com]

Jeff Green in his book: Pluto the Evolutionary Path of the Soul(the second book) writes about the Sadomasochistic Imprint and the Garden of Eden myth. Basically he says that this is a hallmark of the transition to the Patriarchal age and manifests as either Sadism(an anger response to the feeling of separation from God) or Masochism(a guilt-atonement complex, resulting in fear and a sense of inadequacy).

[pretzelsalt.livejournal.com]

yes.

I love how concisely this boils down - when I start talking about this stuff I end up in 48 different places.

I am ever intrigued by the Story of Ham and his sin of seeing his father for who he really was. Punishable by slavery for all time.

His crime was knowing the truth about the father.

[apeiron-gaia.livejournal.com]

From what I understand, and this is just from a minimal reading of the text, is that it is a reflection of Jewish ideas of nakedness. It is a shame on a man to see another man naked.

This is actually, which most people don't seem to know, the reason Jesus instructs if someone takes your cloak to give them your coat as well? I don't know the exact quote. It is a way to cause shame on the other person without doing it through violence.

Same goes for turn the other cheek. People think this means one should have a slave mentality, but that is because they ignore cultural explication. It is a shame on someone who commits a violent act against someone without the other person showing its negative repurcussions. Again, it is a non-violent way of spitting in the abuser's face.

As far as the "divine child abuse" issue, this is a very common complaint with feminist theologians. But if one takes a more chalcedonian understanding of the perichoretic relationship between the immanent and economic trinity, then one need not get stuck on the language of "son" and "father". In a truly perichoretic understanding of the trinity, Jesus is God and God is Jesus. God sufferered WITH his creation on the cross, not as a creature being abused by God. God was on the cross, not a son that is an entity separate from God. God is WITH us in the brokenness of creation. It is these right wingers with no concept of gospel --which rectifies the brokeness found in the law-- and focus so much on God as violent and cruel.

The theology of the cross is indeed a difficult one and has caused so many problems. But I don't think one simply needs to completely unchristianize the christian message in order to explicate anything worthwhile.

[zensandy.livejournal.com]

...there can also be no fall into sin and thus no act of disobedience that destroyed the perfection of God's world.

I find this to be a very interesting point. Who are these humans that they would have the power to destroy the perfection of God's world? While I find the idea of free will compelling, I have serious doubts that humans could alter God's original design. So he either designed us to fail (not a very loving view of the divine), or the whole theory of original sin is flawed.

I much prefer the "unfinished nature of our humanity" theory. Just as children grow biologically into adults, we can all grow spiritually into beings who dwell closer to God.

Thanks for posting this. Your journal always challenges me.

[sophiaserpentia.livejournal.com]

I worry, though the fear could be unfounded, that he sees our "unfinished" nature as a sort of substitute for "disobedient to God" nature. For example, he says that evil is a result of the imbalances of our unfinished nature. In contrast to this, i found in my previous explorations that the next logical step is to question the idea of moral culpability itself, and look for the ways in which dominance, imbalance, and violence warp our ability to act as free agents. Spong has not taken this step; and his "unfinished human nature" theory still sounds like something from which we need to be saved by God. I'm not convinced -- though the matter is open for discussion -- that a "nurturing parent" model of God is any more helpful than a "punishing parent."

[alobar.livejournal.com]

As Bob Wilson sez: Real communication only occurs between equals.

Most of the really fucked up relationships I know of between parents and adult children is when the parents never treat their adult kids as equals. Healthy relationships between parents & adult children is predicated upon friendship, not fealty.

[zensandy.livejournal.com]

Maybe the parent model has outlived its usefulness. Maybe we shouldn't try to analogize a unique relationship. It's the mortal's relation to the divine; what could we possibly compare it to? People will continue to try to understand and define God. But when our definitions limit the infinite, it's time to question the efficacy of our endeavors. Even language itself put limits on whatever we try to understand. Too bad we haven't come up with a better communication method! ;)

[apeiron-gaia.livejournal.com]

Yes, I think the parent model is fundamentally flawed, just as any model is. The intrinsic nature of a model is its lack of fluidity and boundaries. The more we learn about the nature of the divine, the less it is easily bound up in a single model.

I think if we see God as the culmination of love --that God has a proleptic nature, creating and beckoning us forward toward love, not pushing us through time from the past, whereby we are always looking over our shoulder and not ahead of us.

The idea of original sin is so faulty and thick with ambiguous implications, and yet it speaks toward our evil natures. None of us can ever be perfect or not hurt anyone. Life is suffering, and there is no way to escape this endless cycle of our own finitude, except through death. I think the idea that we are somehow perfectable through our own action is, well, just wrong. Perfectable over time with the assistance of that possible divine perfection intimately experienced through what the OT labeled as Shekinah, then perhaps, as one large organism working toward the same goal of "unified diversity", then perhaps. But as we are now so divided, so focused on our individualistic needs, our fears of change and differences and our mortality, then I am not hopeful.

Yeah, I have rambled WAY too long. I dont even remember what I was responding to.

[seraphina-prime.livejournal.com]

I don't know if you're familiar with the Rev. Dr. Matthew Fox, but I've enjoyed the ideas he has in his 95 new theses:

95 Theses: Articles of Faith for a Christianity for the Third Millennium (http://www.matthewfox.org/sys-tmpl/door/)

[sophiaserpentia.livejournal.com]

Thank you for the link. I am familiar with Matthew Fox and his ideas on Creation Spirituality, but i haven't looked as deeply as i perhaps should.

[legolastn.livejournal.com]

Certainly I don't want to downplay Spong's potential influence in publishing this book, but I think many if not most progressive churches have already moved or are in the process of moving away from "atonement," "original sin," and at least the most common understandings of "hell" (if not discounting or downplaying the importance of "afterlife" as a concept in general). I guess the hope here is that such ideas will become more predominant among more liberal/moderate mainline churches.

[sophiaserpentia.livejournal.com]

He is certainly not the first to question these things... heck, i think he is moving away from an imperial misappropriated Christianity towards something which IMO is closer to what the earliest Christians believed. But it is good to see someone with a lot of clout in the mainstream saying these things. I think it will bolster others out there who think in similar ways.

[stacymckenna.livejournal.com]

Love Spong. But you probably could have guessed that. ;)

[brainsluglord.livejournal.com]

If Jesus didnt die for the humanity's redemption, what did he die for? If there is no ultimate good the crucifixtion to replace redemption, then humanity has a far greater source of shame and guilt then the Exodus, doesnt it?