Violence Is

Thanks be to God for the life, books, and ministry of Marcus Borg (1942-2015), rightly described  by The New York Times as “a leading evangelist of what is often called progressive Christianity.”

Posts on this blog that mention Marcus Borg:

“What’s Playing Down at the Presbyterian?”

Richard Dawkins Has More Faith than I Do

A Worthier and Larger Idea of God

Walking our dog, Hobbes, I am sometimes asked by children, “Does he bite?” I explain that any dog will bite if adequately provoked. Though she has a docile temperament, if rushed upon, startled, or aggressively cornered , she will growl, bare her teeth, and, on rare occasion, snap. It’s a dog’s only defense, I explain, if the child is still listening.

Humans are that way too. We ascribe violence to police officers, minority youth, religious extremists—whatever scapegoat we want. But the truth is, violence is an inherently human trait, as well as a creaturely and cosmic characteristic.

In my unpublished mystery novel set in a small Southern town, spiritual profiler John Boswell investigates the untimely death of one of its two Presbyterian pastors, Angus MacDonald. Among the townspeople he interviews is a rotund, Buddha-like former actor living in a houseboat on the river, recently returned from California after ending a relationship with an OCD partner trying to fix the world (who once followed him around the kitchen with a Dustbuster!).  He explains: 

“Finally what ended the relationship was a conversation we had about violence, though maybe I was just goading him because I was tired of his moralistic crusades. I told him that even though I think violence is the worst thing in the world, violence is a natural part of the world, of human nature, even God’s nature. I said, ‘You think God didn’t destroy something to create something new? Creation does violence to whatever was before. And what do you think death is? Death is violence. Violence is. Death is. So get over it.’” Matt paused, gesturing toward a snake that had been sunning itself on a nearby rock now slithering to shore, merely skimming the surface of calm water along the river’s edge.

           

“Then I added, ‘Dirt is. You’re dirt. I’m dirt. We’re all dirt. The world is dirt. So stop trying to vacuum the world!’”

French social anthropologist and philosopher René Girard has done intriguing work around violence. He posits that in cultures with ritualized violence—everything from the Eucharist (when understood as re-enacting the sacrifice of Christ) to the Super Bowl—one on one violence is diminished.

I used Gerard’s work, especially around sacrifice and “the scapegoat mechanism,” in my book Coming Out as Sacrament. In it, I questioned why so many Christians need to see the crucifixion as a sacrifice to God to be forgiven our sins. I prefer the twelfth century teacher Abelard’s idea that the cross enables at-one-ment because it awakens in us an attribute that unites us with God: compassion.

Studies have associated testosterone, the male hormone, with aggression and violence. This prompted friends in MCC San Francisco, a female comic duo called “Fifi and Fanny,” to initiate a wink-wink campaign to lessen violence by reducing male testosterone, encouraging men to give “One testicle for peace!”

I’m reminded of the opening scene in Gore Vidal’s novel, Washington D.C., in which a young man goes out into a stormy night, hormones raging, desperately wanting either to make love to somebody or to kill somebody. The military has always counted on such young men to fight our wars, so it should not be surprising that so many young men are being drawn to terrorism and ISIS. By the way, apparently most Muslim terrorists have as little Qur’anic literacy as gay-bashers have Biblical literacy, yet both often use their respective scriptures to justify their violence.

Human institutions—marriage, family, religion, government, organizations—may curb or channel our human tendency for violence toward upbuilding or destructive ends. A civil civilization may be why we are here. If so, the best reason and the most compassionate values must hold sway over mere instinct.

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Progressive Christian Reflections is entirely supported by readers’ donations. It is an authorized Emerging Ministry of Metropolitan Community Churches, a denomination welcoming seekers as well as believers.

Copyright © 2015 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.  Fifi and Fanny material is copyrighted and used by permission.

"What's Playing Down at the Presbyterian?"

The king in the comic strip Wizard of Id once passed a church sign with the sermon title, “The Wages of Sin.” Consternated, hoping for an alternative, he bewildered his faithful knight by asking, “I wonder what’s playing down at the Presbyterian?”

In progressive circles, sin is not center stage.  Kathleen Norris, in her book Amazing Grace, notes, “Pastors can be so reluctant to use the word ‘sin’ that in church we end up confessing nothing except our highly developed capacity for denial. One week, for example, the confession began, ‘Our communication with Jesus tends to be too infrequent to experience the transformation in our lives You want us to have,’ which,” she writes, “seems less a prayer than a memo from one professional to another.”

A seminary classmate resisted corporate prayers of confession because they often confessed abuses of power, when she felt her sin as a woman was her inability to claim her power, to assert herself. Celtic Christian scholar J. Philip Newell objects to beginning worship with prayers of confession, rightly asking, “How would it be if I began every encounter with my wife telling her what a piece of garbage I am?”

Progressive Christian theologian Marcus Borg thinks that the priestly story of “sin, guilt, sacrifice, and forgiveness” in Sunday worship can lead to a passive spirituality. In Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time, he writes, “Rather than seeing [religious] life as a process of spiritual transformation, it stresses believing that God has already done what needs to be done.” He explains: 

This story is very hard to believe. The notion that God’s only son came to this planet to offer his life as a sacrifice for the sins of the world, and that God could not forgive us without that having happened, and that we are saved by believing this story, is simply incredible. Taken metaphorically, this story can be very powerful. But taken literally, it is a profound obstacle to accepting the Christian message. To many people, it simply makes no sense, and I think we need to be straightforward about that. 

(Btw, Hildegard of Bingen believed the Incarnation was planned from the beginning, not as the result of human sin.)

Borg believes that the stories of the Exodus and the Babylonian exile speak more to the oppression and alienation people experience and/or witness in this world. Though receiving the Law at Mt. Sinai is a part of the Exodus story, the concept of spiritual journey better captures our spiritual imaginations.

And indeed, the first Christians considered themselves “people of the way.” “Disciple” means follower, and the disciples were Jesus followers, as many Christians choose to be designated today.  

To me this is preferable to accepting an identity as “sinners,” which is why I embrace the Celtic Christian understanding that sin is not an inborn characteristic, and its effects can be expunged by encounters with either Creation or Christ.

Confession thus becomes a way of acknowledging we are better than sin as beloved children of God. The New Testament word for sin ’amartia derives from ’amartano, which means “to miss the mark,” confirming a more positive understanding of our nature.

President Calvin Coolidge was a progressive Republican who voted for women’s suffrage. He was also a taciturn Congregationalist, which means he didn’t have much to say, known as “Silent Cal,” unconsciously practicing Benedictine “restraint of speech” (taciturnitas). You probably have heard the possibly apocryphal story of him returning from church one Sunday, his wife asking what the preacher’s sermon was about. “Sin,” he declared. “Well, what did he say about it?” she prodded. “He was agin’ it,” he replied.

We too can oppose sin. Sin doesn’t have to come “naturally.”

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You are encouraged to use a post or quotes in personal reflection, worship, newsletters, and classes, referencing the blog address when possible: http://chrisglaser.blogspot.com. Check out past posts in the right rail on the blogsite, catalogued by year and month.

Copyright © 2014 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.

Richard Dawkins Has More Faith Than I Do

Copyright © 2011 by Chris R. Glaser. All rights reserved.

Famed evolutionary scientist Richard Dawkins is one of those atheists who inspire faith in me even while dissin’ it. I found a recent New York Times interview of him by Michael Powell more uplifting than that week’s religious articles. Of course that’s because most media coverage of religion highlights faults more than insights.

I’ve written before that I am not an atheist because it requires way too much faith! It’s easier for me to believe that there’s a God than that there’s not, not just for psychological comfort, but to fully comprehend the awesome cosmos and all its living things.

I’m with Marcus Borg when he invites atheists, “Tell me about the God you don’t believe in,” because the God I believe in is not the one on which I was reared. In fact, the more I might try to define or describe God, the more likely I am to be wrong, or idolatrous, or just plain presumptuous. At the least God is that “oomph” Dawkins implies when speaking of evolution as progressive, tending toward greater complexity. You could say that when I say the Lord’s Prayer each morning, I am aligning myself with that “oomph.”

The article quotes British literary critic Terry Eagleton’s observation that Dawkins offers “vulgar caricatures of religious faith that would make a first-year theology student wince.” I can’t say if that’s true, but atheists and progressive Christians probably have a lot more in common about the God they don’t believe in than atheists might think.

“If you look up at the Milky Way through the eyes of Carl Sagan, you get a feeling in your chest of something greater than yourself,” Dawkins tells Powell, “And it is. But it’s not supernatural.”

I agree. My feeling and faith of something greater than myself is NOT supernatural. It is an embodied experience. That’s the reality that the story of the incarnation is pointing to: that which we call God is with us, among us, within us.

And the “something greater than myself” also is not supernatural, but a natural and integral part of all that is. The Milky Way serves as an icon revealing that God is also beyond us and beyond our imagination.

“Religion teaches you to be satisfied with non-answers,” Dawkins is quoted as saying. Actually, I believe that much religion has too many answers. Spirituality teaches us, in Rilke’s well-used phrase, to live the questions. 

For those interested in listening to my sermon in Wilmington, DE this past Sunday, Oct. 9, on same-gender marriage, please click on: "The Wedding Banquet"

Coming up:

Rockville, Maryland, Oct. 23: Chris will speak at the Rockville United Church, 355 Linthicum St. 20851 at the 9:30 am morning class on “Claim the God in You as a Progressive Christian” and his sermon title during the 10:45 worship will be “Jesus Was Not a Literalist.” Lunch follows with a question-and-answer period with Chris.

A Worthier and Larger Idea of God

Copyright © 2011 by Chris R. Glaser. All rights reserved.

[Note on last week’s post: Those of you who receive my blog posts in your e-mail or who read my post in the morning last Wednesday will not know that I removed the reference to social activism later in the day. I realized readers might misunderstand Andrew Greeley’s thinking, which is, that “social activism is a consequence of religious faith, not a substitute for it” (emphasis his).]

“Truly I perceive that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears God and does what is right is acceptable to God.”

The outgrowth of the spirituality that Jesus practiced and preached led to this early affirmation of the church. Peter says this after witnessing the Spirit manifest in the character and compassion of people very different from himself, Gentiles.

Peter’s testimony is almost a genetic code in Christianity that could make it adaptable to our 21st century multi-faith, multicultural, multidisciplinary world. You might expect the words multi-faith and multicultural. But I add multidisciplinary because I believe that religion, science, and the arts may all work together for good rather than be pitted against one another as adversaries.

The Spirit gives the slip to orthodoxies that separate “us” from “them,” any religious forms that set up barriers to keep others out, any sacred ritual that makes us “holier than thou.” Each generation needs to imagine a bigger and better God, not in the sense of more powerful and holier and distant, but in the sense of more inclusive and gracious and intimate. If we are to do greater things than even Jesus did, we must follow Jesus into the commonwealth of God—the common spiritual wealth that we share with every creature.

     

The central trouble in the religious thinking of many people lies here: the new knowledge of the universe has made their childish thoughts of God inadequate, and instead of getting a worthier and larger idea of God to meet the new need, they give up all vital thought about God whatsoever.

Who do you think wrote these words? Bishop Spong? Marcus Borg? Elaine Pagels? Some New Age guru?

No, it was a Baptist preacher in a book entitled The Meaning of Prayer, published by the YMCA in the year 1925: Harry Emerson Fosdick, a renowned preacher of his time, a social activist and contemplative progressive. (For more of his efforts to bring religion into a modern age, read Dear Mr. Brown: Letters to a Person Perplexed about Religion [Harper & Row, 1961], which, though dated, is remarkably relevant to what progressive Christianity is attempting to do now.)

Wanting to be confined to a God who only embraces Christians lacks imagination and probability. To paraphrase Peter, May we truly perceive that God shows no partiality, but in every nation, religion, condition, vocation, and discipline, those who revere God and do what is right are acceptable to God.