The Raven Foundation

 

 

 

 

The claim made [in Genesis 1] is not a historical claim but a theological one about the character of God who is bound to his world and about the world which is bound to God.

-Walter Brueggemann, Genesis, 26.

 

 

Genesis chapter 1 is one of the greatest pieces of literature the world has ever known. It’s radical. It’s provocative. And it’s one of the greatest hopes for the future of our world.

 

And yet, as Christians on the right and the left foolishly debate its historical reliability in the face of scientific notions of evolution, we entirely miss the point. Genesis 1 is not about our modern scientific understanding of the world.

 

The point of the creation story in Genesis 1 is to reveal a particular understanding of the character of God and of the world.

 

Walter Brueggemann, one of the most influential Old Testament scholars of the last 30 years, claims that ancient Israel’s creation story “served as a refutation of Babylonian theological claims” (Genesis, 25).[1] So, to understand just how radical Genesis 1 is, we need to contrast it with the theological claims of the Babylonian creation story, the Enuma Elish.

 

Here’s a little bit of historical background: The Babylonians conquered the Israelites and spread them throughout the Babylonian Empire. While in exile, the Israelites heard the Babylonian’s telling their creation story. The Enuma Elish is an exciting tale of conflict, violence, and revenge among the Babylonian gods. But I must apologize for the Babylonians. Their creation story is a bit confusing to our modern sensibilities. But hey, they weren’t writing for our sound-byte culture. It's more like an epic adventure movie. It can be complicated, but the more you know the characters the more you get out of the story. So, I’ll summarize the twists and turns of the Enuma Elish here. (You can easily find the myth online, but the most accessible translation I’ve found is from the book World Mythology.)

 

The oldest gods – Apsu, Tiamat, and Mummu – had some baby gods. And you know what happens to baby gods. That’s right. They turn into teenage gods. (God help us!) Well, as the story says, “The young gods joined together and had merry times. They were so rowdy that they disturbed Tiamat … and their exuberance caused her to resent their presence.” Tiamat complained to Apsu and Mummu about the noise those rambunctious teenage gods were making and they devised a plan to kill those rowdy adolescents.

 

“Apsu announced, ‘I cannot abide the way the gods are behaving! Their clamor continues incessantly both day and night … I desperately need peace and quiet! I shall have to stop their raucous activity the only way I can, by destroying them!’”

 

It was a tremendous, violent, and bloody battle. The teenage gods were led by the “heroic” Marduk. Although he was one of the younger teenage gods (let’s say around 14), Marduk was “the wisest and most able of all of the gods.” The teenagers quickly defeated the “evil” Apsu and Mummu, which left Tiamat, who created 11 monsters and “filled their bodies with venom instead of blood and gave them sharp teeth and long fangs.” (Call James Cameron!) She then enticed some other gods to join her in battle, and chose the god Kingu to be the commander-in-chief of her forces. The hearts of the younger gods were “filled with terror” at the sight of Tiamat and her troops. But Marduk came before his fellow teenagers and announced:

 

“Do not be concerned. I shall carry out your heart’s desire … Soon you will be able to tread upon Tiamat’s neck!”

 

Marduk quickly killed Tiamat and defeated her forces. He then tore apart Tiamat’s body and with her body he created the heavens and earth:

 

“Marduk … returned to Tiamat, stamped on her legs, and crushed her skull with his mace. (20^th Century Fox? Warner Brothers? MGM? Anyone listening?) … Marduk then divided Tiamat’s body into two parts like a shellfish. Half of Tiamat he set up as the sky; the other half he formed into the earth. From Tiamat’s saliva, he created the clouds and filled them with water … He put Tiamat’s head into position to form the mountains of the earth, and he caused the Tigris and Euphrates to flow from her eyes.”

 

After the heavens and the earth were created through the violent death and destruction of Tiamat’s body, the Enuma Elish relates how and why humans were created. Not surprisingly, the creation of humans was equally violent. (Good luck making this movie PG-13.) The gods found Kingu and killed him. Then they:

 

“severed his blood vessels, and fashioned the first human beings out of Kingu’s blood. Then Ea (one of the older teenage gods, let’s say, 19) explained to the humans that the purpose of their lives was to serve the gods.”

The Babylonian theology and anthropology behind their creation story claimed that the gods are violent and the world is necessarily a violent place. In fact, the world is fundamentally bad and evil – as it was formed from the evil body of Tiamat. Humans are doomed to a life of violence – as we were formed from the blood of the evil general Kingu.

 

Now, let’s contrast that story with the creation story in Genesis 1.

 

“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”

 

You can imagine how the Babylonians might have responded. “What!!! What kind of creation story is that? Where’s the rivalry? Where’s the violence? Where’s the blood-bath? How's James Cameron going to make that into a movie!?!”

 

As the Israelites’ story continues, we get a clearer contrast between their God and the gods of the Babylonians. The Israelites’ God keeps talking about the goodness of the creation:

 

“Then God said, ‘Let there be light’, and there was light. And God saw that the light was good.”

 

Kind of makes you read Genesis in a different, ummm, light, huh?

 

The ancient Israelites told an alternative story and, indeed, they refuted the theology of ancient Babylonian creation myth. They asserted that God is nothing like the violent and tyrannical gods of the Babylonians. Ancient Israel’s creation story actually separates God from rivalry and violence. This God doesn’t need to fight a battle to create the universe. Instead, God nonviolently speaks creation into being. And God’s words say something about the world – that the world is fundamentally good, indeed, very good. By Genesis 1:37 we find the anthropological message that humans are not doomed to violence and servitude to tyrannical gods, but rather are created in the image of this nonviolent and gracious God, making all humans (even those crazy Babylonians!) “infinitely precious” (Nahum Sarna, Understanding Genesis, 16).

 

Here’s the difference between the two stories: The Babylonians experienced a violent world and told a myth that justified their violent conquests. The ancient Israelites experienced violence in the world and told a story that disrupted their culture of violence. They looked at the violence in the world and said, “It doesn’t have to be this way. In fact, it’s not supposed to be this way. The world is a fundamentally good and nonviolent place, where God has graciously given humanity every good thing that we need.”

 

And that is why the truth of Genesis 1 has nothing to do with the scientific debate between the right and the left. Genesis 1 is much more important than that. It is about a nonviolent God who peacefully speaks a good world into being.

 

Genesis 1 refutes ancient Babylonian theology that imbued the gods and creation with violence. And wherever and whenever we link God and violence today, Genesis 1 refutes us as well.

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[1] History buffs will know that the Babylonians conquered the Kingdom of Judah, not the Kingdom of Israel, which was conquered by the Assyrian Empire around 740 BCE. Technically the people in the Babylonian Exile would be called “Judah-ites,” or ancient Jews, but I find that cumbersome and confusing. For convenience sake, I'll call them "Israelites."

 

 

 

 

Have you ever wondered how mimetic theory changes lives? ME TOO! So, I decided to put together a top ten list. Here you go:

 

1. You will resent monkeys for the phrase “Monkey see, monkey do” because you know that we humans are by far the superior imitators.
2. You will see the destructive nature of religions.
3. You will see the constructive nature of religions.
4. You will understand the paradox of 2 & 3.
5. You will see how scapegoating works and that the goat you scape may be your own. (I don’t know what that means, but I think you get the picture.)
6. You will impress others as you boldly use words like “mimetic,” “interdividual,” and “internal/external mediation.”
7. You know you have to be bold with #6 to give the impression that you know what you are talking about.
8. You will find out that there is a wrathful divinity and it is us.
9. You will realize how bad it is to be good.
10. You will discover that the best way to scandalize someone is to forgive them.

 

That's my list.  Would you add anything?

 

 

 

I recently read an article by Ross Douthat that summarizes the thesis of his new book, Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics, and by the time I finished reading it I felt like the robot from the old TV show, Lost in Space, waving my arms wildly and shouting, “Danger, Will Robinson! Danger!” As much as I usually admire and agree with Mr. Douthat’s columns, in this case I think he has completely misunderstood the cause of our current political polarization and the cure he offers is not only guilty of romanticizing the past but of promoting a dangerous religious unity.

 

Mr. Douthat says that since the 1950s we have witnessed a weakening of mainline Protestant denominations and an explosion of “more start-up sects, more do-it-yourself forms of faith.” In his article he explains that our tolerance of religious diversity has led to a loss of a shared Christian center that we used to rely on to bridge political differences and “call people out of private loyalties to public purposes… inspire voters to put ideals above self-interest, [and] inspire politicians to defy partisan categories altogether.” Our failure to achieve political unity to address national issues, he claims, is a result of weakened religious institutions and a resulting combative religious environment.

 

He points to the civil rights era as a time when religion served as a unifying force. In the 1960s, our religious institutions were still strong enough to unite people across the political spectrum, so much so that leaders of black churches were able to “shame many Southerners into accepting desegregation.” Douthat longs for that time when “the institutional churches proved their worth as both sources of moral authority and hubs of activism, and where religious witness helped forge a genuine national consensus on an issue where even presidents feared to tread.”

 

I do agree that the civil rights movement offers a masterful example of using faith to inspire reform, but Martin Luther King, Jr. did not accomplish that by appealing to the existing shared religious center. That shared religious center was an obstacle he had to overcome. [Cue robot arms waving wildly.] Segregation was preached as God’s will from pulpits across religious denominations and political divides. King could not appeal to the shared belief at the core of those churches, because that belief was racist at its core. And more problematic still, the racist God was also a violent God in whose name one could fire bomb black churches, murder black civil rights workers, and lynch black men as the main event at a summer picnic. These atrocities were all committed by good Christian folk who believed God was on their side and that they were acting in God’s name. Douthat may try to argue that this does not represent the essential core of Christian faith, but back then he would have a fist fight on his hands.

 

Martin Luther King’s success came from challenging that racist and violent faith by calling on Americans to believe in a different kind of God, a God whose mercy and love could not abide violence of any kind. Not even violence in the name of good, which is actually the only kind of violence there is. To challenge our faith in good violence, King refused to use violence as a weapon. He refused to hate his enemies or exclude them from God’s kingdom, even as they were excluding him.

 

The reason we are so polarized today is not that we have lost a common religious understanding or access to a shared value system, but exactly the opposite. We are at loggerheads with each other because we all believe in the God Dr. King was trying to overcome: the violent deity who is on our side and against our enemies. Despite appearances, we do have a shared national religion, and it is one that cannot tolerate any disagreement. If I am on God’s side and you are against me, I have no choice but to defeat you in God’s name. In this religion, the world is black and white, good and evil, and all differences must be violently eliminated.

 

What Mr. Douthat fails to see is that in our current climate, we have only the appearance of religious diversity. What has proliferated is a profusion of religious groups who all believe in the same violent God and who are trying desperately to distinguish themselves from one another by dividing the world up into good and evil. Not surprisingly, they find themselves and only themselves among the good. They have created a world of false differences to avoid seeing that nothing real distinguishes them from their so-called enemies.

 

Dr. King recognized that dividing the world into good and evil would only generate more division and more violence. He offered us a new kind of unity that would allow differences to flourish. Racial, cultural and religious differences would not be erased in this unity, they would become more fully alive, making the world more diverse, complex, and interesting. This other faith is what Martin Luther King, Jr. and the civil rights movement offered us – a faith in a God of love and mercy who is capable of loving even those we call our enemies. The end of political polarization will not come about by a reunification of our religious center if we are gathering around a God of violence. Such an occurrence would be disastrous for us and for the world. It is what totalitarianism looks like. For a different kind of unity, I offer Dr. King’s own description of the crowd that gathered for the historic 1963 march on Washington, D.C.:

 

The enormous multitude… was an army without guns, but not without strength... It was white, and Negro, and of all ages. It had adherents of every faith, members of every class, every profession, every political party, united by a single ideal. It was a fighting army, but no one could mistake that its most powerful weapon was love. (The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr., edited by Clayborne Carson, 222)

 

Christianity is the religion of a repentant lynch mob. To follow Jesus is to take our victim as our king and to never forget how dangerous the wrong kind of unity can be.

 

Good people across our nation are trying to find answers to the following questions: Was Trayvon Martin’s death a racially motivated murder or something else, an act of self-defense or a tragic accident? Is George Zimmerman a racist or something else, a decent man or emotionally ill? Is President Obama’s response measured and appropriate or something else, too timid a challenge to racism or too dismissive of concerns for safety and security? Is this incident unique or something else, a symptom of culture-wide racism, of too many guns in civilian hands or not enough?

 

Strident voices are shouting at each other from all sides, confident that they are in the right and that anyone who disagrees with them is willfully, undeniably wrong. As the conflict polarizes and we are forced to take sides, it becomes harder and harder to believe in the goodness of those taking opposing views. Here is the eerie thing about all this for me: it is sadly reminiscent of old, tired patterns of debating moral issues that go back to the Civil War. Let me explain.

 

When an issue is morally charged, good people take sides. That’s what’s happening here – the death of a young person from gun violence is a moral issue, and this death has become even more morally complicated by the charge of racism. Racist violence, unarguably a moral wrong, has a long history in this country: the violence of slavery, of white race riots and lynch mobs, and the institutionalized racism of the Jim Crow South. One of the tragedies of the Civil War, and there are many, is the way in which the North was able to hide from its own racism both before and after the war by shifting all the blame onto the South. Christian rhetoric from North and South provided cover. Pro-union sermons claimed God’s divine support for the union; pro-secession sermons claimed God’s divine support for secession. Each side believed they were fighting for God, liberty, patriotism and to claim their place as the true heirs to the Revolution. As Abraham Lincoln said, God cannot be for and against the same thing, so at a minimum one side is wrong. As if that were not enough of a minority position, Lincoln nearly became a minority of one when he dared to suggest that God’s purposes might be something neither side had yet imagined.

 

But wasn’t there a clear right side, an assuredly Godly side, when it came to slavery just as there must be a clear right side with Trayvon and George? Some must think so, especially the ones wearing the “I am Trayvon” t-shirts or speaking publicly in defense of George. But what seems clear at first often gets blurred on closer examination. Take slavery – talk about a clear moral issue! How could it be possible not to condemn the side that would fight to preserve it? The problem with framing the Civil War that way is that the Civil War was not about slavery. Look at that list of causes mentioned in the sermons – nothing about slavery there at all. It is a deafening silence that casts shame on our entire nation. The moral issue that divided the nation was the idea of the nation itself, a sacred cause that justified the killing and the dying. That we did kill and die in unprecedented numbers was taken as proof of our nation’s goodness. Bloodletting always creates hallowed ground. When the war ended and slavery was abolished – a clear moral good – we swept aside the shameful truth that slavery was made possible by a deep-seated racism in the North as well as the South. War erupted, raged and ended without Americans ever openly acknowledging and repenting of racism as a national moral failing. This misunderstanding at the heart of our national memory about the war continues to force the issue of racism underground.

 

And then it resurfaces in Florida and we take sides again thinking for sure we know what the moral issue is and for sure we are on the right side of it. But what if the real moral issue is something else? What if it has to do with the moral failure of thinking we are right? We all know that feeling of righteous rage, or moral indignation when we are sure we have the devil by the tail. Both sides of the Trayvon case are feeling it passionately right now. Maybe that night Trayvon and George were both feeling right, sure the other was wrong. I don’t know, and I don’t want to shift blame from a truly guilty person, especially in a murder case. I think that it is vitally important that the investigation proceed to determine why Trayvon was killed. But I raised the example of the Civil War because the bloodshed was largely due to everyone thinking they were right. Racism continues to rear its ugly head because we have persisted in refusing to share responsibility for what was and continues to be wrong with our nation. Shared responsibility means sharing being wrong, not forcing all the wrong on someone else. The insistence on being right and on accusing others of being wrong allows us to justify our own hatred and violence, the very thing we denounce in others.

 

As we deal with the tragedy of Trayvon’s death, perhaps we might step back from our accusations and self-righteousness to ask some difficult questions: Can I find the grace to listen to, maybe even to learn from, the ones I think are wrong? Can I give up my need to be right and be honest with myself about where I am wrong? Am I strong enough to gaze upon everyone who is suffering, even the ones whose suffering I have ignored or even celebrated? Do I care more about being right than I do about ending racism and making our communities safe for all our members? Can I seek the good in a spirit of forgiveness?

 

I’d like to leave you with the thought that the real obstacle to ending racism may be our need to take sides. It is 150 years overdue, but maybe we can find the grace to stop needing so desperately to be right so that we can embrace both Trayvon and George, an embrace that is generous and large enough to include the good and the wicked, the innocent and the guilty, the right and the wrong. Perhaps peace will have a chance if we can say together, “I am Trayvon and I am George.”

 

Peace Building Opportunity: If you’d like to learn how to give peace a chance in our schools, speak directly with Ted Wachtel on Friday, March 30 on our web radio show, Playing for Keeps. Ted is the president of the world's first graduate school devoted entirely to the teaching, research and dissemination of restorative practices.

Are you wondering what to make of all the God talk in today’s politics? It seems we can’t decide if we want God nosing around our political decisions and anointing candidates for us. Remember the dove that descended on Jesus at his baptism and the voice from heaven booming for all to hear, “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well-pleased”? It’s as if some of today’s politicians think they have a dove floating over their heads and they can’t understand why they are the only ones who hear the divine endorsement: I’m God and I approved this message. Republican candidates in particular like to dally in this double-edged delusion: that (1) God takes sides in American politics and (2) is keeping his divine fingers crossed for your victory.

 

Of course, God will only root for you if your position is the right one. You have to be on the right side of every issue from economics to immigration. Stray across into the grey middle ground and God will join the crowd in calling you weak or wishy washy. Stray all the way to the wrong side and you might as well admit you are siding with Satan. And don’t be fooled by Democratic candidates who don’t use God-talk because they are just as guilty of certainty in the sanctity of their positions. They just claim to be “right” instead of divinely chosen. I’m not sure whose voice they hope we hear, but the point is the same. Being on the right side of an issue, whether you think in religious or secular terms, naturally results in absolute, unwavering, uncompromising faith in your position and total condemnation of your opponent’s. When it comes to casting our votes, they want us to believe in their differences from one another, but the thing that is becoming more and more apparent to voters is how alike the candidates are, not only in their pre-election barnstorming, but in how they behave in office. Choosing one over another seems to be a futile exercise, like choosing which pair of blue socks I’ll wear today. Just reach in and grab one/ vote for one, because the differences don’t matter.

 

And that, folks, is where we are today. Oddly it is where we have been before and the result was an American tragedy. The American Civil War was fought by two sides (there were a slew of diverse positions which telescoped into two opposing armies when the war broke out) that each believed that God was on their side. It was all God talk back then, because religion was assumed to be part of political life. Everyone was more or less a Christian in name if not in practice, and the Bible was the go-to reference book for how to vote or who to support in an election. Folks on both sides of the slavery issue whole-heartedly believed that they had Biblical and therefore Godly support for their position. Did you get that? Both sides of the slavery issue believed that God was on their side and the proof was in the Bible. I won’t go into that here, but if you can attend our conference at Wheaton College on March 16-17 you will hear directly from Civil War historians about how even the pro-slavery South could feel divinely inspired.

 

The salient point for us today is that the abolitionists and pro-slavery folks were locked in a heated argument about their differences, differences so extreme that God was supporting one side and condemning the other. Which side you thought God supported depending on which side you were on, of course. But each side resembled the other in a critically important way: their confidence that they knew the mind of God. Today’s debates around moral issues have a bit more diversity because all sides aren’t making the God argument. But if you substitute “certainty that I’m right and you’re wrong” for “knowing the mind of God” then our debates on same-sex marriage and reproduction, immigration and terrorism, fall into the same pattern as the slavery debate. According to Mark Noll, the insistence of both sides on absolute certainty that you are reading the Bible and the mind of God correctly created a hostile environment leading up to the Civil War that “transformed the conclusions reached by opponents into willful perversions of sacred truth and natural reason.” (The Civil War as a Theological Crisis, page 20) In other words, both slavery and anti-slavery positions were called “perversions of truth” by their opponents so confidently that the truth itself, that both sides were guilty of blind racism, was hidden from view for the next 100 years.

 

But what’s the risk today for a politics of certainty? Politics has become a form of entertainment. No one thinks that all this certainty and God-talk will lead to violence, do we? I mean, we’ve come a long way since the 19^th century; we’d never let things go that far. But there is a place where God talk is part of an outbreak of violence: the fight against Islamic terrorism. Americans insist that we are completely different than terrorists whose conviction that God is on their side leads them to die for their cause and to murder civilians without ever doubting God’s favor. To prove how different we are, when we fight back we are careful to avoid God talk of any kind. But is that a difference that matters? Just like our adversaries, when we kill civilians, we don’t doubt our own goodness. When our soldiers die for our cause, our certainty does not waver. In a very real way, we are exporting our violence right now, allowing our combating certainties to play out in foreign wars. Our Civil War, four years of escalating violence in which over 850,000 Americans died, may be a warning to us that if our current wars end and we don’t start another one, all this certainty may find a violent outlet at home. We may be marching to the tune of our own infallibility toward a Sophie’s Choice of war abroad or the risk of war at home. I wonder which side God is on.

 

Adam and Bob were delighted to welcome acclaimed Civil War historian Professor Mark A. Noll to the program. We talked with Mark about the startling thesis in his book, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis. He writes that in the years leading up to the American Civil War, theologians, preachers and devout churches argued about what the bible said about slavery. They couldn't agree on whether God was for or against the South's "peculiar institution." In his book, Mark says that "the remedy that finally solved the question of how to interpret the Bible was recourse to arms." Listen in as Adam and Bob discuss with Professor Noll how the dynamics of the Civil War continue to influence our lives today.

 

Adam and Bob start the conversation by discussing one of Adam's latest blogs, "The Spiritual Warfare of Lent: Jesus, Satan, and Rick Santorum."  To read the blog, click here.

 

Click on the arrow below to listen to the conversation.

 

 

 

Chills run down my spine whenever I see athletes thank God for a victory or for a good play.  It’s because I think our God-talk matters.  Our prayers matter.  When God is thanked for a victory or a great play, it reveals something significant about the kind of God we believe in.  It reveals that we believe in the “God of Victory.”  That God sides with the powerful, with the winners.  Of course, athletes aren’t the only people who hold to this theology – many politicians, generals, business-people, and pastors believe in the God of Victory, too.

 

Here’s part of my problem – I like the “God of Victory,” too.  He (and usually it’s a He) leads us in battle against our opponents, and if we do all the right things, that God will ensure our victory.  I find this God very enticing.  Indeed, I want this God on my side.  The problem is, if I’m going to invoke this God, I have to reject the God revealed through Jesus Christ.  You can’t have the “God of Victory” and the God of Jesus at the same time.  Jesus sided with the outcasts of culture, especially the outcasts of religious culture.  He didn’t go out and bless the successful, he specifically blessed the losers, the outcasts, the marginalized.  The religious establishment claimed that if you were a loser – if you were poor, or diseased, or blind – that God had cursed you and it was your own fault because you sinned.  (See John chapter 9.)  Jesus went to those losers and he healed them.  He treated them like they were important, because, for Jesus, they were important.  Matthew chapter 4 puts this succinctly.  The first thing Jesus did in his ministry was to go, “throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and curing every disease and every sickness among the people.”   Here we see that Jesus stood in solidarity with the losers.

 

All that being said, I love Tim Tebow.  This is more than just a Christian “you-should-love-your-neighbor-even-if-they-annoy-you” kind of love.  I’m talkin’ man-crush kind of love.  Yup.  Me and the Tebow.  He’s becoming one of my models.  Here’s why: Tobow is bold and I wish I had some of his audacious faith.  He risks his reputation by putting himself out there because of his faith.  When many fellow Christians and many non-Christians began to turn against him for praying before, during, and after football games, I felt sympathy for him.  I mean, I’m sure Tebow is concerned about what others think about him, but I think it’s pretty cool that he’s more concerned about praying.  I can tell you this: I wish I had some of his boldness.

 

Here’s the other reason I like Tebow: he’s forced me to re-think those chills that run down my spine when I see athletes pray.  Those chills mean something about my God-talk, too.  I can get pretty judgmental in my theology, turning the God who sides with the losers of culture into another “God of Victory” who uses power to defeat the winners of culture.  Indeed, there’s an important place for prophetic critique of cultural power systems, but as I break out my inner prophet, I need to acknowledge that I participate in, and benefit from, many of those cultural power systems that create losers.

 

Ultimately, I don’t know what Tebow is praying for.  Is he praying for victory?  Is he praying that no one gets hurt?  Is he praying for the six million children who die every year from hunger?  And is he using his money and influence to help solve those kinds of problems?

 

I don’t know.  And frankly, if I’m asking those kinds of questions to find out whether or not he is a “good Christian” I risk scapegoating him.  I risk putting him down as a “bad Christian” so I can feel better about my own participation in power systems, and feel better about my feeble attempts to transform those power systems.  If I’m going to ask those questions of Tebow and other athletes, I need to ask them of myself, too.  What am I doing to help solve those problems?  Not enough.  How often do I turn a blind eye to the suffering in my church?  In my neighborhood?  In my state?  In my country?  In the world?  All too often.

 

So, I’d say this to my man-crush:  keep praying, Tim.  Regardless of what you are praying for, keep praying.  Because whether you realize it or not, when you pray, you pray to the God who sides with the “losers” of our world.  Because that’s the only God there is.  If it hasn’t happened yet, that God will seize you sooner or later, and I pray that that God seizes me, too.

 

 

 

A.C. Grayling (from left), Matthew Chapman, Rabbi David Wolpe and Dinesh D'Souza faced off on the notion "The World Would Be Better Off Without Religion."

 

A rabbi, a descendant of Charles Darwin, a philosopher and a scholar recently teamed up at New York University's Skirball Center for the Performing Arts to debate this motion: “The world would be better off without religion.” The live studio audience was polled before and after the debate and a winner was declared. Before I tell you the numbers, what do you think? Would the world be better off without religion?

 

Even more relevant – what do you think of the question? I had a hard time taking it seriously, especially after I started listening to the debate. I had hoped that before they jumped into arguing for or against the motion they would define what they meant by “religion”. They did not. For the sake of clarity, I hoped they also might have defined what “better off” meant since it requires a comparison to an imaginary world in which religion doesn’t or never did exist. They did not do that either.  Those arguing for the motion said the things you would expect – we’d be better off without religion because it is the cause of war, provides justification for violence, and is indicative of faulty reasoning. People who believe in God are irrational, hypocritical and violent. Those arguing against the motion said that more wars and genocides had been committed in the name of atheism than God, that religion is an organized system that encourages people to be better and to work for a better world.  They made the counteraccusation that those who said we’d be better off without religion were the ones guilty of faulty reasoning. Nothing either side said changed my opinion that the motion itself was flawed.

 

What the two opposing teams had in common was more telling than their so-called differences. For example, they both clearly got that there was a strong connection between religion and violence. One side thought religion made the world more violent and the other side thought less, but “less violent” was clearly what they meant by “better off”. What both sides failed to see, however, was that it isn’t the presence of religion in the world that’s the problem or the solution, but rather how successful religion is at any time or in any place at doing its job. In other words, the problem is not religion but violence itself. The job of religion is to respond to the problem of violence. Anyone familiar with anthropology knows that wherever human culture is found so is religion. The one does not exist without the other. A key idea of mimetic theory, which is the study of the connection between religion and violence, is that religion solved the problem of human violence, thus making human culture possible. Religion can be thought of as the mechanism that made the proto-human world less violent, putting the side arguing against the motion on the right side of the issue.

 

But to say that religion makes the world less violent misses a crucial point: If it was religion that controlled violence in the proto-human world, how did it do it? Ancient or archaic religion was a religion of sacrifice and it used violence to control violence. It involved rituals, prohibitions, myth and sacrifice: violence was controlled through sacrificial means, temple rituals in which humans and animals were killed often after ritual reenactments of wars or wild times in which all prohibitions were relaxed, kind of like Mardi Gras. The community discharged all its angers, resentments, little built up hurts and grudges in a ritual frenzy ending in the shedding of blood. Mel Gibson’s movie Apocalypto captured the pre-sacrificial frenzy and the calming effect of the sacrifice really well. A little bit of violence in a controlled (ritual) setting kept the violence outside of the community and life could flourish.

 

We no longer have ritual sacrifice per se, but archaic religion survives in a more subtle form. Anywhere violence is justified as a way to bring peace by invoking God’s name – or in the name of any supreme good like ethnic, racial, tribal or national identity – you have archaic or sacrificial religion. Today’s revealed religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism are the biggies) are still engaged with the problem of violence just as they were when they were revealed. The presence of violent passages in the sacred texts of these religions does not mean that they are advocating violence, but that solving the problem of violence is their main function.  To think that those texts are the cause of violence would be like concluding that hospitals cause people to become sick and die. Violence is in the texts for the same reason sick people are in hospitals: everyone is looking for a cure. Revealed religions, though, offer a different cure than archaic religions. Rather than using violence to control violence, they aim at building peaceful communities through practices of love, mercy and forgiveness. This is the non-sacrificial solution but not all their adherents get the message. Religious and non-religious people too easily revert to ancient sacrificial practices: we find all kinds of excuses for using violence, including invoking God’s name, despite the efforts of revealed religions. When Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus or any religious group claims God to be on their side, they are caught up in an old and dying paradigm. The long trajectory of human history is a religious journey away from the use of sacrificial violence toward a new way of achieving peace by peaceful means.

 

Here are the results of the audience survey: Before the debate 52 percent of the live audience thought the world would be better off without religion and 26 percent disagreed, with 22 percent undecided. Afterward, those in favor of a world without religion jumped to 59 percent and those against the idea rose to 31 percent — making the side arguing for a world without religion the winners of the debate. Ten percent of the audience remained undecided, maybe because they sensed the debate had been about the wrong question. The better motion would have been: The world would be better off without the justification of violence by anyone for any reason. Revealed religions are in favor of that motion. Which side are you on?

 

 

You might think that the 19^th century artist Vincent van Gogh and the modern rock band Coldplay seem like an odd combination.  But they both teach us something very important: The color of God’s love.

 

Many would describe van Gogh’s life as a tragedy.  He was plagued by mental illness and extreme anxiety, both of which started in his youth.  His father was a minister in the Dutch Reformed Church.  The expectations of being a preacher’s kid is always tough and his relationship with his father was often in turmoil, yet young Vincent aspired to follow in his father’s footsteps.   He also developed a passion for art.  Vincent became a missionary and then entered seminary, but failed his entrance exam.  After that failure, and in his late twenties, van Gogh chose art over continuing to pursue professional ministry.

 

Failure was a theme in van Gogh’s life.  For example, at the age of 30, he perceived his childhood to be a failure.  In a letter to his brother Theo, van Gogh described his childhood as “gloomy and cold and sterile.”  He claimed his father was dictatorial and stubborn, which led to the failure of their relationship.  Van Gogh experienced little love from his father during his childhood, which sent him on a search for love as an adult.

 

As an adult, he continued to experience failures in relationships and in his profession.  He fell in love and when he proposed she responded, “No, never, never.”  (Ouch!)  Despite being a prolific artist, he only sold one of his paintings, The Red Vineyard, while he was alive.  He was unsuccessful in his other business endeavors, too – as a bookstore clerk and as an art salesman.  As a missionary, he decided to live as the poor men he was ministering to in a Belgium mining field by sleeping on a straw bed in a small hut.  Although this is exactly what a missionary should do, the church authorities determined his behavior was undignified of the priesthood and removed him from the position.  Ironically, he failed as a missionary because he was too successful.  At the age of 35, van Gogh committed himself to an asylum.  While there he “viewed his life as horribly wasted, personally failed and impossible.”  Suffering from depression and mental illness, he attempted suicide on July 27, 1890 and died a few days later from a self-inflicted bullet wound to his chest.

 

So, you might say van Gogh’s life was a tragic failure. But to emphasize his failures is to miss his most important success:

 

He knew the color of God’s love.

 

Van Gogh was not a professional minister, but he chose to minister to people through art.  In one of his letters to his brother, he wrote, “I cannot help thinking that the best way of knowing God is to love many things. Love this friend, this person, this thing, whatever you like, and you will be on the right road to understanding Him better, that is what I keep telling myself.”  Van Gogh tried to help people know God’s love through his paintings, and the color he chose to reveal God’s love was … yellow.

 

In his book, The Jesus Creed: Loving God, Loving others, Scot McKnight claims that “The best-kept secret of van Gogh’s life is that the truth he was discovering is seen in the gradual increase of the presence of the color yellow in his paintings.  Yellow evoked (for him) the hope and warmth of the truth of God’s love.”

 

This “gradual increase” of yellow in his paintings reflects his gradual understanding of God’s love.  Take, for example, his most famous painting, Starry Night.  At times, God’s love feels distant, like the stars.  Notice that in Starry Night the most prominent yellow is in the distant stars.  Now, look at the church.  The place that should be über yellow is dark.  Where is God present in the world?  Van Gogh says nowhere.

 

 

Another of van Gogh’s paintings, The Raising of Lazarus, is not as famous as Starry Night, but you see the drastic difference in the use of yellow.  An angel comes to Lazarus and resurrects him to life.  Life from death.  That was van Gogh’s hope.  In spite of his failures and his madness, he hoped in God’s love.  Indeed, sometimes God seems as distant as the stars, but God’s love is right here, present, and seeking to foster new life.  To paraphrase Paul in Romans 8 “For I am convinced that neither our failures nor our madness, not even death itself, can separate us from the love of God.”

 

 

 

Yellow is everywhere.

 

Now, you may be wondering, “That’s all fascinating, but what does it have to do with Coldplay?”  (Thank you for the segue.) Coldplay released their debut album Parachutes in 2000.  That album included their smash hit called … “Yellow.”  I can’t help but think of van Gogh’s use of yellow to reveal God’s love when reading these lyrics:

 

Look at the stars,

Look how they shine for you,

And everything you do,

Yeah, they were all yellow,

 

I came along

I wrote a song for you

And all the things you do

And it was called yellow

 

So I took my turn

Oh what a thing to have done

And it was all yellow

 

Your skin

Oh yeah your skin and bones

Turn into something beautiful

You know you know I love you so

You know I love you so

 

I swam across

I jumped across for you

Oh what a thing to do

Cause you were all yellow

 

I drew a line

I drew a line for you

Oh what a thing to do

And it was all yellow

 

Your skin

Oh yeah your skin and bones

Turn into something beautiful

You know for you I’d bleed myself dry

For you I’d bleed myself dry

 

It’s true look how they shine for you

Look how they shine for you

Look how they shine for…

Look how they shine for you

Look how they shine for you

Look how they shine

 

Look at the stars

Look how they shine for you

And all the things you do

 

There is a long tradition that claims that God is light, so stars are perhaps our best symbol for God’s love.  The stars are our source of warmth, and they do shine for you, but not just for you.  They shine for everyone and all of creation.  You cannot control the light that beams from the stars.  Just like God’s love, you can’t hold it for yourself.  It permeates the world, making it all yellow.

 

 

Still, it is hard for us to trust that yellow is in our world.  As van Gogh knew so well, God’s love often seems distant.  That’s why God’s love swims and jumps across the abyss that seems to separate us from God.  God swam across because we were all yellow; we were all loved by God.  We see this in the Judeo-Christian tradition when Moses encounters the burning bush, when the prophets speak God’s word, and ultimately in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.  In that life and death, we find that God’s love is all inclusive and non-violent.  Even when we reject it, even when we make God’s love in Jesus bleed dry, God’s love returns in the resurrection to shine for us, offering forgiveness, peace, and love.

 

 

 

Look at the stars.  Look how they shine for you, symbolizing God’s eternal love for you, for all humanity, and for the world.

 

 

***************

Where do you find God in the world?

When has God seemed distant in your life?  When has God seemed present in your life?

 

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Adam discusses the theological and anthropological implications of Halloween. It is the day when it is socially acceptable to dress up and identify with what is socially unacceptable. One example is monsters. On Halloween we identify with our monsters. This is interesting because it is easy to identify others as monsters, but difficult to identify our own monstrous behavior and tendencies. The anthropologist René Girard states in his exploration of mimetic theory that humans have always formed community by uniting against a scapegoat. Archaic sacrificial religions functioned in a way to channel our internal conflicts onto another - our scapegoat. Jesus offers healing to the monsters of the world, including the monster within.