commercial break!

OK, so yesterday I promised all these cool upcoming posts...and tonight we went in to New York City (and back) so I don't have time for a "real" post.

But why did we go to NYC, you might ask? We were on the Colbert Report, which is on Comedy Central at 11:30pm. It aired tonight but we didn't get to see it because a) we were on a train home, and b) we don't have a TV. But it was fun being part of the live studio audience, and the show's hilarious. So if you're ever in NYC, plan ahead and try to get free tickets to the show...

More responses to QuakerK's post tomorrow hopefully.

early friends and the bible

Over on the blog Quaker Glimmerings there is a great discussion going based on the post entitled "Why Quakerism isn't Evangelical Christianity." I think QuakerK, the author of Quaker Glimmerings, makes some excellent points, and although I grew up in an evangelical Friends community, I too sometimes wonder if one can concurrently be evangelical (as it is known today) and Quaker. However, I think Quakerism and Christianity definitely go together, and the early Friends were Christians in a form of radical discipleship few are willing to follow.

QuakerK suggests several points, so I will focus on the first today.

1. Early Quakers did not stress the Bible. Quite the contrary, they stressed that the scriptures were not the Word of God, but rather that Jesus was--and they got a lot of flack for this, too.

In some ways this statement is true: Quakers stressed that it is Jesus who was (and is) the Word of God, present and revealing truth to them through the Spirit. Christ as present teacher is more important than the Bible, but the Bible to the early Friends was still the Word of God, and the Word of God who is Christ and the written Word wouldn't contradict one another. Sometimes we don't understand the appropriate reading of a text and so the Spirit illumines it for us, interprets what is meant for one cultural setting but not our own, or helps us understand something which has been misunderstood for centuries (e.g. slavery). The Bible isn't God, but it is a record of people's experiences of God throughout history, and I think a majority of early Friends would have agreed that God somehow speaks through this text in a way that is unique from how God speaks through other texts.

I don't see it as true that early Friends didn't stress the Bible, however. It is said that George Fox practically had the Bible memorized. He read it often and used its principles in his teaching and preaching. The beginning of Quakerism, as I said in my initial comment to the Quaker Glimmerings post, was when Fox heard God speak to him, "There is one, even Christ Jesus, who can speak to your condition." I think if I heard this I would start reading everything I could find about this "Christ Jesus" person, and texts that told me about him would tend to be fairly important to me. And I think that was true for Fox. As I read the Journal I see biblical references interspersed throughout the entire thing. Even when he doesn't quote the Bible directly he makes allusions to biblical concepts, stories and persons.

The same can be said for most other early Quaker authors. In college for my History and Doctrine of Friends class I read part of William Penn's "No Cross, No Crown," and could hardly wade through it because of all the quotations from the Bible. I also took a Quaker Seminar on early female Friends authors, and we read many of their pamphlets and journals, collected in a book called "Hidden in Plain Sight," compiled and edited at Earlham School of Religion. In all of these there are massive amounts of quotes and paraphrases of Bible verses. It is almost as if the early Friends who wrote these pieces knew the Bible so well that it was just a part of their everyday language. They don't stop to say, "This is from Matthew 5:9," because it's also from their heart and soul. It's a part of who they are.

And yet, at the same time, I think evangelical Friends today could do well to remember that the Bible IS NOT God. The Bible isn't revelation, it isn't God incarnate, it isn't the Spirit, it's just a book. It's a book like any other book--except maybe more dangerous than most--unless it is read through the illumination of the Spirit. God uses it to speak to us still today, but it is only one way God can speak. The people who wrote it down were human, the people who copied it were human, the people who decided which books and which versions of books to canonize were human, the people who translate them for us are human...and yet amazingly, through all this, God can still use it as God's Word! But it isn't God's only Word, or even God's most important Word--just a witness to the Word who is Jesus.

If my theology professors saw this they would cringe--so I guess Quakers are still getting a lot of flack for this idea that Jesus, as the true Word of God, can speak to us in other ways than through the Bible.

QuakerK, thanks so much for your post! It's a great discussion starter, with lots of good points to consider.

Coming up: Quakers and universalism, physical resurrection of Jesus, atonement theories, and "tone" of early Friends vs. any Friends today. I'm looking forward to this! =)

what canst thou DO?

Today I was reading a book for church history class called "You Have Stept Out of Your Place: A History of Women and Religion in America." A chapter I read today was about Native American women in the nineteenth century, and about the women who went to them as missionaries.

As I wrote about a little bit in my post on missions, often Christianity was so associated with "civilization," i.e. white Western culture, that missionaries ended up being more imperialists than anything religious. That was also the case a lot of times in missions to Native Americans. White women felt that converting Native American women to Christianity and to Western ways would elevate their status and give them more freedom. So to become a Christian meant to give up all their ways, take on the traditional gender roles of Western culture, change your main language and style of dress, and for women, to learn Western ways of keeping house and raising a family. Young girls were put in boarding schools so they would be kept away from their families and tribes and not have the "bad" influence of their culture.

The way we treated Native Americans is a huge dark spot on white Westerners' reputation. I'm not sure which was worse--the way they treated black slaves or Native Americans. To some degree, they treated black slaves better: they kept them in their communities and wanted them to live. At least they understood the humanity of Native Americans enough to realize they posed a threat, and they respected that personhood enough to know they had to kill them in order to take their land. But both ways were horrible.

It's hard now to know what to do about all that. I mean, we can say we're sorry, we can try to be more sensitive with other cultures in the future, we can do all we want to make sure various racial and ethnic groups are treated fairly in our nation now--but how much do these things really matter in the face of the fact that we destroyed many, many Native American cultures and decimated the ties of so many African Americans to their native land? We shouldn't be held responsible for the faults of our ancestors, but at the same time, in recognition of the pain and destruction that happened, and the fact that we are still benefitting from what slavery accomplished and from the land that was stolen, what can we do? It's impractical to think of giving all this land back. We certainly can't give lives back, and we can't bring back the habitat--the animals, the trees, the clean rivers--that we've destroyed.

But it seems that these people should receive some repayment...

bible translation

I spent some time tonight writing a response to a Friend on our World Gathering of Young Friends listserve, so I figured I might as well kill two birds with one stone (if I was John Woolman...heh heh) and post that here as well.

A question was asked about Galatians 2:15-16, which a Friend heard says in the Greek "faith OF Jesus Christ" rather than "faith IN Jesus Christ," which might seem to have the connotation of us needing to have faith of the callibre of Jesus' rather than faith in him as part of God. So here's my response, although it's just a preliminary analysis of the text.

Galatians 2 (Cherice's literal translation)
15 We ourselves [are] Jews and not out of ritually unclean nations [usually translated "Gentiles"]. 16 But we knew that a person is not justified/vindicated/acquitted out of works of a law if not through faith of Jesus Christ, and we believed in Christ Jesus, so that we were justified/acquitted/vindicated out of faith of Christ and not out of works of a law. 17 But if [when] we desired to be justified/acquitted/vindicated in Christ we were found also [to be] ritually unclean ones, then is Christ an agent/intermediary to sins? Certainly not!

There are several forms of the word usually translated "sinners." This one generally means "those who are ritually unclean," often associated with their occupation because they're required to touch unclean things and therefore become unclean (shepherds, tax collectors), those born with physical defects or who have diseases, women who are pregnant or on their period, and of course anyone who's not a full-blood Jew. The term in NT times generally refers to "outsiders," those who are not accepted by the Jewish elite community because of their designation as "unclean."

Likewise, the term translated "Gentiles" literally means "the nations," and it's where we get our word "ethnic." It's a specific kind of ritually unclean person--one that can never become clean short of conversion, circumcision, etc. The English of this makes it sound really elitist and self-righteous, but I think what the author means is that he and those he's writing to were born into Judaism, so although they can follow the law, following the law is not enough for them to be "justified."

The word "justified" is difficult because we don't use it anymore in common language, so it's been relegated to the position of an antiquated religious term along with "sanctified" and "unction"[except for Peggy!] and stuff like that. I think the Greek word basically means "to be made righteous." The word as a noun means "righteous." We can't be made right by following laws alone.

Then the Jesus part...my f/Friend is right: it does say "through faith of Jesus Christ." But that's not all it says, because the very next line says "and we believed in Christ Jesus." The word for "in" here has a feeling of motion--we moved into faith in Christ, and then in verse 17 the word for "in" is a stationary word. We are fixed in our faith in Christ. The conditional clause (if-then) in 17 is more like "since now we're fixed in faith in Christ, if we're found to be ritually unclean, does that mean Christ is helping us sin? Of course not!" So he's actually making a case for not having to worry about who's "clean" and "unclean" anymore. But it's clear from the context that the author meant that people were to have faith IN Christ, not just faith like that of Christ.

But I do find it interesting to look at that phrasing and think about how watered down we (as Christians) sometimes make it--we just have to believe IN Christ, and that's enough. But this passage is also saying to have faith LIKE Christ.

One more thing: where it says "we were justified out of faith of Christ and not out of works of a law," the "out of" means "from the source of." So what it's basically saying here is that we are made right "from the source of" what made Jesus righteous, rather than from the source of the man-made law. We're not just clean because we follow some rules, but we're clean (whole, transformed, being perfected) "from of the source" that Christ was walking in, which is God. Pretty cool, eh?

This is a really interesting passage, pretty much summing up Christian belief.

It can be difficult to know who to believe when it comes to Bible translation, because things can be completely altered just because of someone's translation choices. Even as I'm learning Greek it's hard because the ways we're taught to translate various words can change the meaning, but that's the definition we're given. So unless we all want to become Greek scholars and learn all the nuances of the language, even having an introductory understanding of Greek doesn't always help a whole lot because I'm using someone else's definitions. (But if you're looking for a good English translation I suggest the New Revised Standard Version, because they try to make it as literal as possible, leaving ambiguity when it's in the text and trying not to make theological choices for the reader.)

But I think that's the beauty of it. There IS ambiguity. There IS room to think and wonder and explore. Greek is pretty ambiguous sometimes, and so we get to wonder, did the author mean A or B, or both? Plus when it was written down punctuation and spaces between words hadn't been invented yet so we're not even sure that we have that right. So we build off what scholars over the years have thought.

Even with all the ambiguity, I trust God to speak through this text. It has its flaws, and sometimes it's frustrating because we don't know what is culture and what is meant for all, and it's hard to understand. But I learned a lot just by looking at this passage for a half hour or so, and I think it helped me grow in my faith because of it. So thanks, Friend, for bringing up this topic, and giving me a chance to show how nerdy I am! =)

the devil?

A few posts ago, Liz asked what I thought the Quaker view of the devil is, and I gave a quick response, in the comments area, but I'll try to give a more full answer here. This is a sticky topic, because believing in a personified devil figure is not very popular in our postmodern culture.

It's obviously very difficult to pin down the "Quaker view" on anything, so I'll do my best and then say what I think.

In early Quakerism there was a lot written about being involved in the "Lamb's War," that is, the war of Jesus against the powers of darkness. I don't think they probably questioned whether there was a personified devil any more than they questioned whether there was a personified God. To the early Friends, having faith is to become a soldier in a war against evil (to be distinguished clearly from the War on Terror!). They recognized that there were evil forces at work, and that it took sacrifices in order to advance the Kingdom of God. This Kingdom is not a flesh-and-blood kingdom, it's not going to be a government or even a form of government (although Penn kind of tried that), but it's a coming age when the righteousness and justice of God will rule because all will know and follow God. Their work as Christians and as Friends (which were one and the same to them, as far as I can tell) was to follow their commander, Jesus/Holy Spirit, even when it meant death. And it often did mean death, or at least imprisonment, because they were sincerely fighting against evil, and evil was fighting back.

As far as Quakers today, Quakers in "developing" countries I think generally would believe in a personified devil. They are mainly on the evangelical end of the Friends spectrum and tend to read the Bible more literally. Their cultures generally are more spiritual, in that they believe in a spirit world that effects daily life all the time, for god and evil. So they can understand Christianity with its duality of good and evil spirits.

Although there isn't exactly a personified devil in the Old Testament (the serpent is never named as the devil, the "adversary" in Job is interpreted as the devil but not so named), a concept of a personalized devil has developed by New Testament times: Jesus is tempted by THE devil (given a definite article in Greek, meaning it is a specific entity not just a force of evil or a demon), the Lord's Prayer in Matthew says "Deliver us from the Evil One," (again with the definite article in the Greek), and Jesus and his disciples expel demons from people--and these are just a few examples. So there is definitely biblical reason to believe in personified evil spirits and one head devil.

American Christian Quakers don't talk about the devil much, at least in circles I've been in. There is talk of sin and sinful nature, and I think it's more popular to think of an evil force that corrupted our human nature, as it was supposed to be created, from the Image of God to a distorted image that can't help but sin until it's regenerated by God's grace through Christ, and through the Holy Spirit helping us to recognize God's grace and accept it. Many American Quaker Christians also believe there is a devil who personifies evil and may encourage acts of evil in the world.

Some people think that demon possession is really mental disorders, and Jesus could heal the person's mind as well as their body, so he wasn't expelling demons but healing the mind. But this doesn't really make sense with the biblical witness because the demons can talk, they recognize Jesus as the Son of God, and they can be driven out of a person and into pigs.

And some American Quakers don't believe in a devil at all, especially those who do not identify themselves as Christians or who think the Bible is an interesting and helpful story but shouldn't be taken literally at all. Probably some American Quakers don't believe in evil, only in structural injustice, which causes evil things to happen, which influences more evil things...etc.

So what do I think? Well, philosophically and theologically, from a Christian perspective, there are many problems with believing in a personified devil, and there are many problems with not believing in said devil. If there is a devil, where did it come from? Did God create it? If so, can God create evil? There is no place in the Protestant Bible where the story we're told of Satan as a fallen angel appears, although I think it's in the Apochrypha (which is in the Catholic Bible), so probably was written sometime between the Exile and the time of Jesus (about 500 years). So pretty much in the Protestant Bible, the devil just shows up in Matthew 4 for the first time and there is no indication where it came from. So it's hard to know if Judaism was just influenced by its neighbors, espeically Zorastrians who were complete dualists, and took on the idea of a personalized devil when there really isn't one, or if the understanding of the evil spiritual world kept developing over the years as they learned to understand the good spiritual world more fully as well.

Another problem is dualism. If we believe in the devil, does that mean there's another force that is outside of God? If God can't take any part in evil, how could it come to be without God? Is there another eternal power besides God? Christian doctrine says no: God is the only infinite. So where could this evil being have come from? We can explain sin as a rupture in relationship with God, and that God din't create this but created the possibility. But it's harder to explain an actual entity whose purpose and personhood is evil incarnate.

At the same time, as a Christian I can't just ignore passages in the Bible that talk about a personified devil. I can choose to believe that they are allegorical, but I can't just discard them without thinking about them.

And I've been thinking about this issue a lot lately for a couple reasons. First, I read an autobiography of a Christian woman from South Korea for my church history class, and she said she hadn't believed in demons but then she saw someone with a demon, and she and another minister prayed, they talked to it, and eventually it came out of the man. This autobiography was written in 1988. I don't think she's making this up. We could explain it away by saying the person had a mental breakdown and believed there was a demon speaking through him but he made it all up, but he wasn't even a Christian and knew nothing about Christianity and yet the demon knew the name of Jesus, etc. (Cho Wha Soon, "Let the Weak Be Strong: A Woman's Struggle for Justice," 1988.)

And today I was reading a book called "The Song," part of a trilogy of "The Singer," "The Song," and "The Finale" by Calvin Miller. These are allegorical stories that explain Jesus' life and then how Christians can live like Jesus. They're really cool--you should read them. They're written almost in the form of poetry, and the flow of the words and the imagery is amazing. Anyway, so the devil comes to this Christian (although they have different names, it being an allegory), and has changed forms. No longer is he "World-hater," this being that everyone knows is evil and whom they fear because of his evil power, but now he is "Sarcon," he is beautiful, he is the ideal person, he knows science and trusts reason, and people are drawn to him because they can understand what he's saying--as opposed to the Christian message. Instead of loving something outside themselves, Sarcon teaches people to love themselves and to try to reach some ideal. Knowledge is the ideal, and science will get them there, because if they just figure out one more thing they'll be able to unlock the secrets of the universe. This is a form of trying to be like God--not that science is evil in itself, but the desire to know everything so that we can be in control, this is idolatry.

So I wonder if perhaps "the devil" has changed forms in Western culture. Instead of being a personified being who we could easily avoid, evil has become amorophous--just the basic desire for power and control, knowledge that will keep us from death, understanding that will keep others subjected to us. If people were possessed by demons they would know there was evil out there. But they're being sneakier--with subtlties we can't quite grasp we are influenced to desire power, recognition, control, love, on our own steam.

I'm not sure if there is no personified devil, or if there is. I'm not sure if there are demons. But I know that there is evil, that sometimes I'm taken with an inane desire to do something that I know is stupidly hurtful or wrong, that sometimes I don't want to do what I know would draw me closer to God who is Life, and whether this is just me and my own stupid human nature or whether this is a personified devil doesn't really matter much. But I'm not throwing out the idea of a personalized devil just yet, because I've had experiences where there's a feeling of deep, unexplainable darkness, and I can't forget the power this has. But thankfully, amazingly, God's power is greater.

I pledge to be in this Lamb's War, even if it takes suffering and death, even when I'm scared, even when I'd rather do something more "respectable." Who's with me?

fiction

Why is fiction so enjoyable? I think I could sit around and read novels most of the time and be happy (as long as they were good ones). I might need some time hanging out with real people, and I might read outside sometimes after a nice hike, and I might need to process what I was reading with people either verbally or in writing, but other than that I think I could just read novels all the time. Maybe I just feel that way right now because I'm tired of reading heavier stuff, and the bit of time I give myself every few days to read fiction is much anticipated.

But fiction in itself is really enticing. Whether books or movies, it seems like most people are interested in stories. Even in cultures who don't/didn't have access to books and movies, story has always been a huge part of culture. What is it about fiction that draws us in so much?

Part of it is learning about another person's perspective and experiences. In other cultures before this proliferation of fiction I suppose they used narrative to define their group's identity. What do we use fiction for now? A lot of people talk about it as an "escape." What are we escaping from? I don't think of it as an escape. For me, reading fiction shows me something about what it means to be human that I can't learn from my own life. It shows me life in a form that I can't see without a story, but I can see once it's written in such a way that I can grasp it. This isn't really knowledge that is empirical or objective--I can't really explain (usually) that I learned X, Y & Z from such and such a novel. I can say things I learned, but the things I can speak are not the only things I learned. There is something deeper going on, something about fiction that feeds my soul and nourishes it, something that shows me how to live rather than being an "escape" from life.

This isn't always the case, of course--sometimes I get sucked into a junk novel or watch a pointless movie for the escape of it, but even those, if I allow them, can "speak to my condition," can show me something about who I am and what I value, that I may not have thought of otherwise.

But in my rather utilitarian mindset, it often seems silly to me to read fiction. It didn't ever happen! It will never happen! Why am I wasting my time sitting around reading when I could be doing something that would help someone? But I think art does help people. I think it's essential for us to experience creativity, even if that creativity is "only" to allow our minds to be drawn in to someone else's work of art. Our minds are amazing things and can be nourished and grow even--and perhaps especially--from coming in contact with someone who is not ourselves through art we would never have imagined.

So here's my encouragement, I guess: go enjoy some good art, and allow yourself to think of it as time well spent.

easter

Yesterday was my sister's birthday and I told her, (being the wonderful older sister I am), "Your birthday is the only day this year that Jesus was dead all day long!" (She looked mock-indignant but thought it was funny.)

In trying to decide what to write about just now she and I had a good discussion about easter and Jesus' resurrection and all that. In my class about the gospels the other day we looked at all the resurrection accounts and discussed how and why they appear different, so I was ready with all sorts of theological data to bore my sister with, but I had fun with the discussion anyway... =)

So reading the 4 gospel accounts, it is unclear who was there when they discovered Jesus' body wasn't in the tomb, or what happened, or whether the women told anyone and who they told, and who came to see, and how many angel(s)/young men there were--but the main part is the same: Jesus died on Friday, all his disciples (being the good Jews they were) stayed at home on Saturday because it was Sabbath and it was too far to walk to his tomb, and then when they went to visit the tomb Sunday morning, Jesus' body wasn't there and no one knew where it was.

Three of the four gospels has post-resurrection accounts of individuals seeing Jesus in the flesh for the forty days after his resurrection. Mark has no conclusion, really (at least in the part that is legitimate, ending at Mark 16:8). It just says that the women saw that Jesus wasn't there, a young man told them he wasn't there but to tell the disciples to meet Jesus in Galilee as he'd said, and the women left and told no one because they were afraid.

I kind of like this ending, because it makes you decide what you believe yourself. So, what did happen? It's pretty much agreed among historians that the main facts are true: a man named Jesus of Nazareth lived during that time, died, and his disciples didn't take his body but believed that he had raised from the dead. The disciples wouldn't have taken the body, because it's pretty clear from reading the gospels that they didn't have any idea what was going to happen before Jesus died. And the Jewish leaders wouldn't have taken the body, or else they would have shown it once the disciples started saying Jesus had been raised. No one knows for sure what happened, historically speaking...

So Mark leaves the question open: what do you believe? Who do you say that he is? (Mark 8:29)