Dismay: The Christian Right
Marcus Borg is brilliant and arguably the greatest Christian theologian of our time. I just finished rereading the epilogue in his book Jesus: Uncovering the Life, Teachings, and Relevance of a Religious Revolutionary. The epilogue is a better read than the rest of the book, which is also very good, but Marcus Borg’s candid dialogue in the epilogue gives it impact. Below is an excerpt from the epilogue, which so accurately sums up the Christian right and the state of Christianity in America.
The most publicly visible Christianity in the United States today is a hardened form of the earlier Christian paradigm. As in common usage, I will call it the “Christian right.” I trust that this is not dismissive name-calling or excessive stereotyping. I am simply seeking to name it, not to intensify a polarization that already exists.
It is called the “Christian right” because it is both theologically and politically conservative. Theologically, in harder or softer forms, the Christian right affirms biblical inerrancy and literal interpretation. Politically, it supports the political right with varying degrees of conviction.
The Christian right is found primarily among evangelical Christians, a broad and somewhat imprecise category that includes most fundamentalist, conservative evangelical, and Pentecostal Christians. Not all are part of the Christian right; there are important exceptions. But most — probably 80 percent or more — identify with the Christian right.
It is the most visible and vocal form of Christianity in America today. The evidence of its visibility is obvious. The Christian right dominates Christian radio and television. It includes almost all of the “megachurches,” mostly new congregations with ten thousand or more members. It receives the most media attention. And it is the most politically involved. Often and correctly called the electoral base of the political right as a whole, it is assiduously courted by the secular wing of the political right.
The issues for which the Christian right is most publicly and visibly known are familiar:
- It is against evolution. It campaigns for “intelligent design” in public school curriculums. Without the Christian right, there would be no controversy about the teaching of evolution. Interestingly, there is no such controversy in other historically Christian countries. It is an American phenomenon.
- It is against abortion. Its preferred term is “pro-life,” but this means primarily the beginning-of-life and end-of-life issues of abortion and euthanasia. For the most part, it does not apply a “pro-life” ethic to what happens during life. It generally approves of capital punishment and war and generally opposes the notion that government should provide a safety net that supports and nourishes life. That, it feels, should be left up to individuals and charities.
- It is against homosexuality, which it views as a sinful lifestyle choice. It strongly opposes what it sees as a pervasive “gay agenda” at work in our culture.
- It is known for its emphasis on “values,” but its values focus quite narrowly on questions related to sexuality, including gender. Abortion and homosexuality have just been mentioned. In addition, it favors teaching sexual abstinence in publicly funded programs, is ambivalent about contraception because it might contribute to immorality, and protests against excessive sexuality in movies and television (but generally not against violence or consumerism). It is concerned about gender roles within the family and within the church, including whether or not women can be ordained as clergy.
- It supports the civic affirmation of Christianity (or of what it often calls “the Judeo-Christian tradition”), including prayer in public schools and Ten Commandments in public places.
Its political influence extends beyond these issues. In addition to its very visible and vocal advocacy of these causes, it generally supports the political right on other major matters. The stakes are high because of America’s role in the world and Christianity’s role in America.
We live in a time of the American Empire. To say that we are the empire of our time is no longer a left-wing claim, but an affirmation embraced by conservative advocates and architects or our imperial power. I add that empire is not necessarily about territorial expansion; we probably have no such ambitions. But empire is about the use of superior military and political power to shape the world in one’s own interests, and to do so as unilaterally as possible.
Our cultural context raises an acute and urgent question: what does it mean to be a Christian and a citizen of the empire? It is, of course, an ancient question as well, central to the Bible, Jesus, and early Christianity.
The answer of the Christian right is clear: it supports American imperial policy and the use of armed force to enforce that policy. The demographic group providing the highest percentage of support for going to war in Iraq was white evangelicals (over 80 percent). They continue to be its largest group of supporters — in spite of the fact that Christian moral teaching, Catholic and Protestant, forbids starting a war and has done so for over sixteen hundred years. Before then, Christians were pacifists. Since then, Christian teaching has permitted going to war as a last resort of self-defense — but not preemptive war, a “right” that our government now claims.
Given this long tradition of Christian teaching of war, why were the streets of America not thronged with millions of Christians in the months leading up to the war saying, “We must not do this — it violates all Christian teaching about the conditions under which we may go to war”? The most persuasive answer is because of the imperial captivity of much of the church in the United States.
ON the environment, most of the leaders of the Christian right are either silent or advocates of a God-given human dominion over nature. The result is a neglect of environmental regulation, and often opposition. Many ridicule the evidence for global warming, thereby encouraging their followers to discount what scientists are saying about the problem.
On government and economic policy, most see government as at best “a necessary evil” and embrace the “smaller government, lower taxes” rhetoric of the secular political right. As a result, they support economic and tax policies that benefit the wealthiest among us. This is occurring in the context of a growing gap between the wealthy and the rest of our population over the last twenty-five years, especially the poor but also much of the middle class. Much of the Christian right supports an economic and tax policy sharply in contrast to the Bible’s passion for a more just distribution of God’s earth.
Again, I emphasize that this is not a description of evangelical Christianity as a whole, but of the Christian right in particular. Not all evangelicals see things this way. Indeed, all of the points I have just made are made by evangelical authors critical of much of what is happening within their own tradition.
Among them is Jim Wallis, author of the important best-seller God’s Politics. Near the beginning of that book, he poses a question: how did the religion of Jesus become pro-rich, pro-war, and only American? For Christians, it is a provocative question that should haunt us in what often seems to be a Christ-forgetting country.
The visibility of the Christian right has an additional consequence: many people outside of the church have a very unfavorable image of Christianity. Some examples from my own experience are:
- The majority of my students at Oregon State University grew up outside of the church, this state being one of the least “churched” areas on the country (and perhaps even number one on that list). Most of them have a very negative view of Christianity. In surveys, they regularly characterize Christians as anti-intellectual, literalistic, self-righteous, judgmental, and bigoted. It is not difficult to discern where they got this impression.
- Several midlife professionals have told me that they’re embarrassed to tell their colleagues at work that they go to church because of the assumptions they think their colleagues will make. As one of them said to me, “It’s such a conversation stopper.”
- My wife and I know many people who are on a religious journey, a spiritual path, but who think of Christianity as the last place they would look to find something of value.
- As a friend said to me, “The greatest obstacle to Christian evangelism in our time is Christian evangelists.”
Errors of Prophets: When Prophets are Wrong
Prophets are not omniscient. I find it troubling how much weight religions invest in this notion that prophets are somehow infallible. There’s an interesting example in the Gospels of the New Testament involving John the Baptist, who Jesus said was “the greatest among the prophets.” This exalted status as a prophet makes this example all the more interesting.
In Matthew16:14 Peter tells Jesus that some of the people are saying that Jesus is Elijah. A few days later the disciples ask Jesus “Why then do the scribes say that Elijah must come [before the end]?” The scribes were asking this because there was a prophecy in Malachi 4:5 that said God would send Elijah before the end of the world. Jesus answers:
The text of Matthew clearly indicates that Jesus was implying that John the Baptist was the fulfillment of the Malachi prophecy. According to Jesus in this text John the Baptist was Elijah.
Now, let’s take a look at the Gospel of John where John the Baptist is answering questions about who he is:
Obviously there is a conflict here. Jesus says in the Gospel of Matthew that John the Baptist is Elijah, while John the Baptist himself declares in the Gospel of John emphatically that he is not Elijah. Who is right? John the Baptist, the “greatest prophet”? Or is Jesus right? For a fundamentalist Christian this text poses a problem where the “greatest prophet” makes a statement that is in direct conflict to an interpretation by Jesus. To a non-fundamentalist this shows that there was a wide range of understanding about Old Testament prophecies among the Apostles. And this raises another question. John the Apostle, according to Matthew’s gospel, was at the event in Matthew 17 where Jesus proclaimed that John the Baptist was Elijah. So why would the apostle John later write in his own Gospel that John the Baptist was not Elijah?
The Word Logos is Light
I frequently hear Christians misuse the following famous passage from the Gospel of John:
Christians frequently use The Word in this passage to mean the Bible, and then extend this to Jesus, saying that both were “In the beginning”.
First, everyone from a Judeo-Christian background will agree that this verse is referencing the famous introduction to the book of Genesis:
But where does the Word fall into the Genesis reference? We get additional clues of what the Word is referencing if we continue reading John 1:
It should be clear what the reoccurring theme in these few verses is: light. So how does this reference the Genesis account? The first words spoken by God in the Genesis story are “Let there be light!” or Yehyeh Or in Hebrew.
So the Word referenced in John 1:1 is the word Light, not the Bible. With this in mind, other passages become clear, like why Jesus says “I am the light of the world”. Clearly Jesus did in fact believe he came from this primeval light source. However, throughout John he references this light and tells his followers that they have equal access to this light.
In addition, the ancient Hebrews associated the divine name YHWH with the Hebrew verb “to be”. This is most likely what the author of John believed as well. Remember, the phrase “let there be light” in Hebrew is only two words: “Yehyeh”=”let there be” and “Or”=”light”. Then it’s very likely John was trying to imply the following: “and the Word (light) was with God (YHWH=Yehyeh)”.
Language Application
I’m adding an appended section to this blog entry so that I can get a bit more technical for those who have some knowledge of the languages. I personally believe there is a strong possibility that there was an Aramaic original for the Gospel of John based on some indicators in the grammar. The word “with” in John 1:1 is the Greek “pros” which usually means “to” or “toward” in its simplest form. If there is an Aramaic original, the word “pros” in Greek indicates a prefixed Lamed preposition, which in Aramaic is also used to represent a direct object. As a result of this, I think there is a strong possibility that the fragment “the word was with God” and the fragment “the word was God” are two different possible translations of a single statement in the Aramaic original text. In other words, the original Aramaic text under this would have had only one sentence: “the word was [prefixed lamed]-God”. The scribe translating into Greek gave both possible translations, but by choosing the Greek preposition “pros” instead of “meta” or “syn”, he left an unintentional clue. The other option is that originally there was only one statement, but a scribe put a note in the margin of another possible translation, and when this manuscript was copied, the copiest shuffled the comment into the body of the text. This happened very frequently. In the LXX of Daniel there are sections of verses that are twice as long as the Hebrew. If you translate the additional Greek statements back into Hebrew, you begin to see that the letters in the Hebrew words had letter forms similar to the existing Hebrew letters. In other words, there were other possible translations of these texts that scribes put in marginal notes that were eventually shuffled into the main body of the texts by a later copiest. As a result, all copies of that copy branch, the branch we eventually inherited, had the comments mixed into the main body of the text making it impossible for readers to know what the original text had.
Aramaic Gospels: The Dove, Jonah, and the Baptism
The New Testament is written entirely in Greek. But many scholars for the past few centuries have speculated that the Greek gospels we inherited from the 1st century are translations of Aramaic originals that have been lost. Most of the analysis has focused on idiomatic phrases or grammatical structures in the Greek text that would be better suited to Aramaic. Some of these arguments have weight, but I’m going to suggest that the narrative of the New Testament gospels may present a more compelling argument that Aramaic source texts did in fact exist for the Gospels. In this first post on this topic we’re going to analyze the baptism of Jesus and a couple of obscure passages in the New Testament gospels where Jesus makes cryptic references to Jonah, the Hebrew prophet who was swallowed by a fish. Let’s start with Mark 1:9-13 where Jesus is baptized by John in the Jordan river:
Recall that our English translations of the New Testament are based on ancient Greek texts which were written in the late 1st century, but our oldest fragments are copies that date to the 2nd-3rd century. When studying the New Testament most students have a hard enough time dealing with the Greek. But if we want to see what Jesus taught, occasionally the Greek is an obstacle and we must think in Aramaic which is the mother tongue of Jesus and his immediate followers. With that in mind, let’s do a quick analysis of the word Dove in the New Testament.
The word Dove in Greek is Peristeran, which has no special significance in Greek; it simply means Dove. However, we know Jesus’ native language was Aramaic. So if we were to hear Jesus say Dove in Aramaic or Hebrew, he’d say “Yonah” or “Jonah“.
With this in mind, take a look at the following passage from Matthew 16:
In our Greek text of Matthew the name Jonah is given by Jesus in response to a demand to receive “a sign from heaven“. First, the cryptic nature of the reply should alert us that something special is going on here. In this passage, why does the Greek have Jesus saying the only “sign from heaven” is going to be Jonah, a man? The answer is that the author of the Greek text incorrectly transliterated the Aramaic word Dove, when the author should have translated it. If we assume this passage has an Aramaic source, Jesus actually is referencing his own baptism where a dove appeared as a sign from heaven. In other words, what Jesus is saying to his questioners is:
Battistero Neoniano, Ravenna, Italy 451-75 CE
And really this translation makes much more sense because the passage is dealing with a “sign from heaven”, which would naturally refer to a creature living in the heavens such as a bird, not a man. So the Greek text which has been handed down through history has preserved the erroneous reading of Jonah instead of the Aramaic correct reading of Dove. Cryptic narratives in the Greek can sometimes only be explained if we translate the Greek back into Jesus’ mother tongue of Aramaic.
Why would a scribe decide to transliterate the word Jonah instead of translating it as dove? I think the reason is simple. As the years passed, the number of myths and stories about Jesus performing miracles and signs began to increase. The gospels were written decades after Jesus was crucified and they wanted to incorporate all of these miraculous signs into their gospels. But there was a conflict here: why would Jesus say you’re not getting any other miraculous signs except the sign of the dove at my baptism and then proceed to perform miracles which culminated in the miracle of a resurrection? In order to reconcile this conflict, they decided that the statement about the dove was really a prophecy of the greatest miracle of the resurrection, referencing Jonah’s three days in the belly of the whale. The scribes smoothed out this apparent conflict in the statement of Jesus by transliteration instead of translation. This exposition can be seen in two passages, Matthew 12 and Luke 11, which parallel this “Jonah/dove” passage and attempt to expound the cryptic meaning inherent in the erroneous reading of Jonah instead of Dove. In Matthew 12 and Luke 11 the Jonah passage is expounded as a prophetic passage of Jesus spending three days in the tomb, just as Jonah spent three days in the belly of the whale. This type of metaphorical interpretation of Old Testament stories became increasingly popular among the 2nd century Christian authors who attempted to make every Old Testament story point to Jesus (see the book of Barnabas as a good example of this type of work).
Economics of Jesus: Capitalist or Socialist
I find it strange that the economic principles of Jesus are rarely studied, especially in America where an entire political party is built largely on Christianity. Jesus actually spends most of his time teaching about money in one form or another, and states that money is antagonistic to the kingdom of God: “You can not serve both God and Mammon (the god of money)” - Matthew 6:24.
Before going too far I’d like to make a bold claim. I’d like to suggest that Galatians 2:10 is the most important verse in the New Testament for understanding what Jesus taught. When this verse was penned by Paul, Jesus had already been crucified. The book of Galatians is one of the earliest books of the New Testament, dating to the middle of the first century. Paul is describing a falling out he is having with the 12 apostles. He has suggested to the apostles that he go and preach the gospel to the non-Jewish people of the west. What is so interesting to me is that in this candid, very early book of the New Testament, he discloses that the 12 apostles ask him to remember only ONE thing. What would you expect them to ask Paul to remember? Jesus is God? Jesus died for your sins? Here’s the verse:
Let’s examine a few verses to see if we can draw some preliminary conclusions that will help us understand why this doctrine of poverty was at the heart of early Christianity. Let’s start in Acts 4:32-35, where the Christian community of the 1st century was struggling to organize after the crucifixion of Jesus.
We see in the early Christian community a tendency for sharing of possessions and money among the community. Is this something Jesus taught them to do, or was it just a community trying to survive? Let’s look at Mark 10 to see if this practice in Acts was learned from Jesus:
So this rich man was turned away because he refused to give up his wealth. Additionally there was a severe penalty for not fully participating in the redistribution of wealth described in Acts 4 as illustrated in Acts 5:1-11 where Ananias and Sapphira were killed for withholding money from the community. Let’s return briefly to the passage of Galatians 2:10 where Paul says the apostles asked him to “only remember the poor”. Is there any evidence outside of this verse that poverty really was the central doctrine of Jesus? In Luke chapter 4, the first public proclamation of Jesus is “I have come to preach the Gospel (the good news) to the poor.” In other words, Jesus saw that his primary objective was to address the poor. Whatever his message was, the poor were the ones who were supposed to hearing it.
From a statistical standpoint, the word “poor” appears 25+ times in the gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John), and an additional 15+ times in the other books of the New Testament.
A number of scholars have suggested the following theory, some explicitly, some tacitly, but I’m going to suggest that the odds are incredibly in favor of this option: what if there was a religiopolitical party in the 1st century called “The Poor”? In fact there was, and they claimed that Jesus and James were its principle leaders. The party came to be known as The Ebionites, which in Hebrew means “The Poor”. I won’t go into all of the controversy around this group, but what I will say is that in the second and the third centuries the Christians of the west hated them, because beliefs of western Christianity had deviated so far from the Ebionite belief system that common ground was impossible, so they attacked the Ebionites as being heretical. The Christians of the west were now sponsored by the empire and the wealthy class, while the Ebionites of Jesus’ home country were in poverty, their religion was built on poverty. The converts of Paul in later generations couldn’t understand them from an imperial roman viewpoint.
Let’s return to Galatians 2:10. Now that we know there was a religio-political movement in Palestine during the first century called “The Poor Party”, or “The Poor”, that claimed to have descended directly from Jesus, could we read the passage from Galatians 2:10 like this:
James, the older brother of Jesus, became the leader of the church in Jerusalem after Jesus was crucified. Unfortunately we only have one authentic letter from him. The following is one of the most important verses from James, which supports a view of poverty as the central doctrine, and more importantly suggests the name of their group was in fact “The Poor”:
In other words, the noble name by which they are called is “The Poor”. The context of James’ passage demands this reading. In the context of this passage he is referencing the suffering of the poor and immediately shifts into an argument that challenges the listener, who were poor, “don’t they slander the noble name which you are called?” The NIV translation and some others have intentionally tried to manipulated the Greek into saying “Are they not the ones who are slandering the noble name of him to whom you belong?” But the words “of him to whom you belong” is not in the Greek and has been supplied. Unfortunately translation is interpretation, and sometimes this is theologically driven which hides what the text really means.
In other words, this passage is referencing the ancient religiopolitical party called “The Poor”, or The Ebionites.
Jesus and The Poor
Let’s examine Matthew 6:19-21,24:
No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other; or else he will be devoted to one and despise the other. You can not serve both God and Mammon (the god of wealth). -Matthew 6:19-21,24
Again, from a modern point of view most readers assume Jesus is really saying “you can be rich, just don’t let it rule your life.” But this is not what Jesus was saying. From all the evidence the movement he started took this statement literally, so that you couldn’t be his follower unless you gave up everything and took a vow of poverty. To be a true follower of Jesus meant giving up all your wealth. To be a true member of The Poor, or The Ebionites, meant living a life without money and possessions. In fact, the monastic life probably can trace its roots to the original teachings of Jesus and the apostles. After Emperor Constantine in the 4th century made Christianity the religion of the Empire, all of the original teachings of Jesus regarding a life of poverty were re-interpreted, all those Ebionites who held to the original teachings of Jesus were deemed heretics, and churches became the centers of wealth and pomp. By the 4th century, Jesus’ original religion of poverty had vanished.
When reading the New Testament through the Ebionite/poverty point of view a number of other stories become clear. The feeding of the 5000 from the food that a few attendees had brought to the event was really a demonstration to show that by redistributing the few resources that were available there would be enough food for all to be satisfied, a demonstration that would be considered socialist from modern standards (Matthew 14:13-21). By removing the element of sharing from this story, a powerful demonstration of a community sharing resources becomes nothing more than a magic trick by a magic man, completely deflating the story’s power and purpose.
I frequently hear Christians quote the verse “give unto Caesar the things of Caesar” to support the notion that Jesus supported taxation. We know from other revolts from the same era, such as Simon bar Kokhba’s revolt in the 2nd century, there was a move to mint a Jewish national coinage to avoid using the imperial Roman coinage. Let’s look at Matthew 22:15-22
Jesus and his followers were required to give all their wealth to the poor. It is quite likely that they were trying to back completely out of the Roman monetary system in protest to the heavy taxes Rome was taking. The rationale may have simply been “if we don’t have money for them to take, they can’t take anything.” In other words, what Jesus was saying is “if it has Caesar’s image on it, give it back to Rome; we don’t need their money.”
Conclusion
Jesus’ primary doctrine was social justice. His movement was originally called “The Poor”, or The Ebionites. As illustrated from the gospels and Acts they were implementing a social movement where one of the requirements was to share all that you had, ultimately taking a vow of poverty. This was either a temporary protest against Roman occupation, or a permanent model akin to modern socialism. A secondary conclusion is that Jesus’ teachings are at odds with the teachings of protestant Christian capitalism in the United States. Economic individualism and Darwinian economics, or survival of the fittest economics, is in conflict with Jesus’ core teaching of poverty and sharing. It is also clear that the economic principles Jesus taught were mandated by Jesus and his community before one could join (ex. the rich man being turned away and the death of Ananias and Sapphira in Acts 5); charity in the original Christian group was not voluntary, but compulsory. I’m not suggesting Christians should support this model; I’m simply asking that they admit that Jesus taught a different economic model than that supported by Christians in America. “Survival of the fittest” economics is completely at odds with Jesus’ economics.