The Serpent's Wisdom

Once upon a time, i was a conservative Christian. I turned away from this during my early teens, when i began to realize that certain of my beliefs simply could not be reconciled with logic, science, reality, and my personal experience.

During my years as a non-Christian, as i explored many different approaches to spirituality i never stopped feeling like a spiritual refugee, and so when i learned about Gnostic and liberal Christianity i began to think maybe i had found a way to come home, spiritually speaking.

Liberal theology is rooted in an approach to scripture at odds with the fundamentalist belief that the Bible is literally true, infallible, and designed as a timeless guide to life, belief, and morality. It has nothing to do with liberal politics, though many liberal Christians are also liberal politically.

Finally, a kind of Christianity i could sink my teeth into!

But after years of exploration in the realm of liberal theology, i find i still cannot reconcile Christianity, this time with economics, ethics, philosophy, justice, and again my personal experience.

Christianity is based on the idea that humans are separated from God in some profound way. The conservative Christians talk about "original sin" and "sin nature" which passes from father to offspring. In the Calvinist formulation, people are inherently "totally depraved," utterly incapable of embracing good and worthy by default of eternal damnation.

The problem with this belief is that it is damagingly divisive. Someone who is "lost in sin" is too easy to see as less than fully human, less than fully capable, worthy of pity or rejection. It is too easy to justify to oneself participating in the mistreatment of people who are called by one's leaders less than fully human; and history bears out the problems this has allowed.

Liberal Christians understand how divisive this belief has been and rejects its overt forms. But most of the liberal theology i've encountered does not, in the end, truly reject it -- because they still rely on Christ for some sort of salvation.

Spong, for example, proposed we understand humanity as "incomplete," still a work in progress. Other liberal theologians describe us as in need of healing from without, in need of divine guidance or leadership.

In the past, i looked to the idea of soteria as "healing" or self-improvement in the hopes of understanding Christian doctrine in a non-divisive way. This approach can only work if and only if healing is seen as voluntary, as something we seek if we recognize a need for change in ourselves. It should never be seen as something which all of us must undertake -- because then it becomes, in turn, an "us vs. them," a question of "who is seeking healing and who isn't?"

But the idea of Christ as an envoy from God, or a reflection within humankind of the divine presence, makes it impossible to think of healing as something voluntary -- because Christ, as the perfect human, the ideal to which we are to aspire, is a yardstick by which we will always come up short.

The fundamentalists see Christ as God in human form. Liberal theologians are likely to see Christ as a metaphor for human potential, or the divine presence in an understandable form; or they see Jesus as an extraordinary person, someone of immense charisma who moved socio-political mountains and taught people a lot about tolerance and love and co-operation.

I was striken then very hard by the observation of Elisabeth Schuessler Fiorenza that perhaps the proper way to view the early Christian movement is not one that starts and ends with Jesus, a single extraordinary individual, a man who saves us all by leading the way to a bright new world, but as a broad and diverse social movement to which many people contributed with their bravery and their witness. In this view, Jesus is simply a person who became, for a time, the movement's chief galvanizer and spokesperson.

To take a galvanizing figure and make him a figure of worship or emulation and to make him the central focus of theological inquiry takes the emphasis from where it must be (justice and compassion). The idea of Christ is therefore misappropriation; it diverts inquiry from the hard questions of justice and ethics and spins us in a whirlpool of philosophical auto-eroticism. (ETA: Alright, i know that's harsh. But immersion in a quasi-Marxian-inspired point of view has made it difficult for me to see anything that does not immediately contribute to justice as a potential contributor to the status quo, by taking our energy away from the important areas of focus. I've always been accused of being too serious for my own good.)

Is there any way to preserve the idea of Christ and maintain a focus on justice and compassion? I eagerly sought one. The best i could come up with is the idea that Christ is something which those who follow the Christian path are called upon to become or to embody when we they confronted with a person in need or an ethical dilemma.

But if that's the way it works, then phrasing it in terms of "Christ" or "savior" is distraction -- or worse, because the loaded cultural values of these terms means that phrasing discourse about acting justly or compassionately in this way makes us forever in danger of being diverted away from ethics and onto the distraction of Christology. It's safer just to say, "We have to be just and compassionate with one another," than to bring a religious term into it that risks diversion.

This leads to another concern i had, which is that once you apply a word to something for ease of description, people take the word and run with it as a label, and use it in a normative way to distinguish between one thing and another. Similarly, any kind of organization formed by people of one generation to solve the problems they face becomes a rigidified edifice which tends to cause problems in future generations.

In other words, anything resembling "systematic" theology or philosophy -- the attempt to coalesce one's worldview into a concise set of concepts -- puts us in danger of creating fodder for the perpetuation or justification of injustice.

That's a damn drastic thing to say, i know: but i've expounded several times in recent months on why i have concluded that there is no way any ideology can be "the answer" to human ills. This is a thunderous insight that continues to reverberate throughout my brain and shake down wall after wall. It's a threatening idea to anyone who has a pet ideology, and i even sometimes find myself resisting it. But if there is anything that has been shown to be true by the witness of human experience, it is this.

I don't understand my relationship with Christianity. It's as convoluted as a fractal.

I don't identify as a Christian and i don't "believe in" any of the primary doctrines. I reject the idea of original sin and therefore the whole notion of "redemption."

And yet it still feels like my home. I cannot escape it. I am still drawn to examine it, and i still find inspiration therein. I get angry when i see it employed in the service of oppression and exploitation, as if it were appropriated from me. As i've written before, i do not think that following the Way is about what one believes, but about one's compassion and faith.

Currently i am reading Schuessler Fiorenza's book In Memory of Her (the title is a reference to Mark 14:9). She pulls an idea i like from Koester and Robinson, about finding the "trajectory" of Christian striving. The trajectory i see describes an inspired yet human quest for justice and compassion. Redemption then is not us being saved from the world by a remote God, but learning to listen to the divine voice calling for compassion and encouraging us to fulfill our potential.

For example, lately i've been thinking about the idea that we are all participants in the murder of Jesus. There is no explicit Biblical support for this idea; passages which say we are all sinners are read as though this is what it means. Reading the passages on their own, you would never derive that meaning from them; you have to be told to read it that way.

But instead there *is* explicit Biblical support for the idea that we die with Christ. Here it is, explicitly:

[Romans 6:6] For we know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin—
[7] because anyone who has died has been freed from sin.
[8] Now if we died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him.
[9] For we know that since Christ was raised from the dead, he cannot die again; death no longer has mastery over him.
[10] The death he died, he died to sin once for all; but the life he lives, he lives to God.
[11] In the same way, count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus.

We cannot both participate in the crucifixion of Jesus, and die with him. It must be one or the other. The difference is monumental, of course. If we are collectively the murderers of Jesus, then no punishment in hell or on earth is too severe. This in turn has been used as justification for anti-Semitism and other prejudice-driven abuse. If however we are co-sufferers with Christ, then God is on our side. We are called to revere the Christ which lives within each other person.

[Galatians 2:19] For through the law I died to the law so that I might live for God.
[20] I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.

The idea of "trajectory" means that we cannot rest upon what has been done before, but the struggle against injustice continues. It requires insight and honesty, the recognition that the fountain of spirit still flows. To use a metaphor from Alan Watts, a river cannot be trapped in a bucket and still be a river. It also requires the vigilance to see that the unjust seek always to misappropriate what can be used against them, so that it is nullified as a threat to them. The way i see it, this is what has happened to Christianity, starting with the writing and redaction of scripture and the establishment of a worldly church.

I veer back and forth, between despairing that Christianity has become so riddled with injustice and hatred that it is irredeemable, to angry refusal to let them get away with it. In the past i have described myself as a religious exile, feeling like my homeland has been stolen away and i stand on a remote plain watching as foreign occupiers live in my home.

By what authority do i claim it as my home? The claim is not predicated on "authority"; i am a bat nasha and the basileia tou ouranou belongs to all.

An essay in Karen L. King's (ed.) book, Images of the Feminine in Gnosticism has me thinking about this passage in I Corinthians:

( 1 Cor. 11:3-16 )

It's been argued that the proper way to read this, is that Paul was rebuking the Corinthian congregation for practices and theology which he felt was inappropriate. But what was it that the Corinthians were doing and teaching?

Well, it seems that some of the men were growing their hair long and/or covering their heads for worship, while some of the women were cutting their hair short and/or uncovering their heads for worship.

The argument of Dennis MacDonald is that the Corinthians had instituted a practice, in reflection of neo-platonic or Gnostic teaching, which involved denying or transcending one's gender and working to become an embodiment of the primal androgyne. The primal androgyne, in his understanding of neo-platonic myth, is fundamentally masculine, and so therefore women are still being denegrated in concept, even though the practice of removing their veils ostensibly makes them more free.

Such a practice might explain why women would remove the veil which marks their gender socially. However, he ignores and cannot explain why certain Corinthian Christian men would have veiled themselves, which they seem to have been doing. He also doesn't present any evidence that ritual androgynous dress was employed in ritual by any Gnostic or neo-platonic group at any time. He seems driven to devise an argument designed to make Paul look more like a feminist than the Corinthians or the Gnostics. (Edit: some of this is addressed in the rebuttal by Bernadette Brooten.)

The popular theory (such as that espoused by Elisabeth Shussler Fiorenza) is that the Corinthians were employing ritual transvestism as a way of incorporating Pagan ecstatic practices into their worship. If so, then Paul's main goal is to "de-ecstasize" Corinthian worship -- which idea is further supported by the fact that Paul follows this discussion with a chapter delimiting the idea of "gifts of the spirit."